Int. J. Med. Arom. Plants, ISSN 2249 – 4340 RESEARCH ARTICLE Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 115-121, September 2011 *Corresponding author: (E-mail) stiwari@lycos.com http://www.openaccessscience.com ©2011 Open Access Science Research Publisher ijmap@openaccessscience.com Assessment of genetic diversity among Aloe vera accessions using amplified fragment length polymorphism Niraj TRIPATHI, Navinder SAINI, Sharad TIWARI* Biotechnology Centre, Jawaharlal Nehru Agricultural University, Jabalpur 482004, India *Corresponding Author, Tel: +91-7612681089 Article History: Received 6 th August 2011, Revised 15 th September 2011, Accepted 16 th September 2011. Abstract: The use of herbal medicines has gain tremendously in the last decade. Amplified fragment length polymor- phism (AFLP) was employed to assess the diversity in 12 elite accessions of Aloe vera collected from different locations of Madhya Pradesh, India. Among the twelve genotypes the AFLP primer combinations generated a total of 410 frag- ments with an average of 51.2 fragments per primer combination. In order to assess the discriminatory power of eight primer combinations used, a variety of marker attributes like unique alleles, percent polymorphism and polymorphism information content (PIC) values were calculated. Genotyping data obtained for all polymorphic fragments were used to group the accessions analyzed using the UPGMA-phenogram and principal component analysis (PCA). The cluster anal- ysis showed a considerable level of variability among the collected genotypes of Aloe vera. Keywords: Genetic diversity; Polymorphism; Molecular markers; AFLP. Introduction Aloe vera syn barbadensis Mill. of the fami- ly Liliaceae is a tropical plant easily grown in hot and dry climates (Reynolds and Dweck 1999). Aloe vera, commonly known as “Ghrith Kumari” (in Hindi), has become naturalized al- most in all parts of India (Klein and Penneys 1988). Aloe vera is originally from Southern Africa and cultivation elsewhere is the result of introduction (Akinyele and Odiyi 2007). Pre- sently, it is used as an important ingredient in different cosmetic formulations. The uncon- trolled collection by the local communities for the herbal medicine vendors, usually harvest Aloe leaves, causing a serious threat to its popu- lation in the nature as well as to biodiversity. An understanding of germplasm diversity and ge- netic relationships in a germplasm collection is an invaluable aid for conservation and crop im- provement strategies. Diversity assessed by molecular markers is independent of the influ- ence of environment and estimated using DNA from any growth stage. Among different marker systems available at present, AFLP (Zabeau and Vos 1993; Vos et al. 1995) is a multilocus DNA fingerprinting technique that approaches the ideal as a marker system for assessing genetic diversity among individuals, populations and species (Mueller and Wolfenbarger 1999). High levels of polymorphism and high degrees of dis- criminative capacity are the main advantages of AFLPs for closely related accessions. AFLPs have been used to estimate genetic relationships and authentication of many medicinal plants species e.g. Swertia (Misra et al. 2010), Tribulus terrestris (Sarwat et al. 2008), etc. Comparative studies using Restriction Fragment Length Po- lymorphism (RFLP), RAPD (Random Amplifi- cation of Polymorphic DNA), AFLP and micro- satellites have shown that AFLP is the most- efficient method to estimate genetic diversity owing to their high reproducibility and multip- lex ratio (Powell et al. 1996; Pejic et al. 1998). However, there are no reports for the use of AFLP techniques for the genetic assessment of aloe. In a very first report, Shioda et al. (2003) used the RAPD technique in identification of Aloe species. In order to improve the medicinal value of Aloe vera and also to fill the gap between the demand and the supply of elite planting materi- al, there is a need to conserve this species for