Detection of somaclonal variation in micro-propagated Echinacea purpurea using AFLP marker

This study used amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) analysis to assess genetic fidelity between primary regenerants of Echinacea purpurea derived from leaf organogenesis and their donor plants. A total of 40 regenerants and 5 donors (T6-28-0, T3-23-0, T5-9-0, T2-15-0 and D7-4-0) were subjected to AFLP analysis using eight primer pairs. The results indicated that a total of 3805 scorable fragments were observed, of which 301 (9.40%) were polymorphic among the tested regenerants and donors probed with eight primer pairs. The percentage of polymorphic fragments within five donor groups averaged from 1.6% to 20.6%. Jaccard's similarity coefficients among regenerants and donors averaged from 0.9508 to 0.9935. However, only two regenerants (T2-15-2 and T2-15-3) had Jaccard's similarity coefficient value of 1 as comparing to their donor, thus they were true-to-type to their donor T2-15-0. It appears that AFLP is a sensitive and reliable molecular marker to detect possible somaclonal variation in micro-propagation system of E. purpurea. In vitro culture-induced somaclonal variation occurs in primary regenerants of E. purpurea derived from leaf organogenesis, though some of regenerants have genetic similarity greater than 0.99 in comparison with their donors.