AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH COMMUNICATION CENTRE www.arccjournals.com/www.legumeresearch.in *Corresponding author’s e-mail: itsgunjeet@gmail.com Legume Research, 40 (1) 2017 : 1-8 Print ISSN:0250-5371 / Online ISSN:0976-0571 Assessment of molecular diversity of greengram [Vigna radiata (L.) Wilzek] through RAPD Gunnjeet Kaur*, Arunabh Joshi, Devendra Jain, Ganesh Rajamani and Divya Vyas Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Rajasthan College of Agriculture, M.P.U.A.T., Udaipur-313 001, India. Received: 20-04-2015 Accepted: 13-10-2015 DOI:10.18805/lr.v0iOF.9442 ABSTRACT A total twenty three genotypes of green gram (Vigna radiata) were subjected to Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis for molecular characterization. A total of 25 randomly selected decamers were screened, out of which only 15 generated 126 amplification products from which 117 bands were found polymorphic, the average polymorphism being 93.48%. The total number of amplified bands varied between 2 (primer OPP-09) to 17 (primer OPA-1) with an average of 9.5 bands per primer. The overall size of PCR amplified products ranged between 200 bp to 2900 bp. The average Polymorphism Information Content(PIC) was 0.32 ranging from 0.17 to 0.46. Primer OPA-01 and OPP-06 detected two unique bands ranged between 250 bp to 2500 bp in two genotypes (PUSA-672 and HUM-12). Jaccard’s similarity coefficient values ranged from 0.28-0.90 with an average of 0.59. Based on dendrogram generated through UPGMA method and PCA, most of the genotypes got divided into four main clusters. Genotype EC-398885 lay far apart and thus showed maximum genetic distance. The assessment of genetic diversity is a prerequisite and important step for the improvement of any legume crop. Thus, present results of the present study could be further extrapolated to other green gram accessions in Vigna germplasm. Key words: Diversity analysis, PCA, Polymorphism, RAPD, Similarity coefficient, UPGMA. INTRODUCTION Green gram ( Vigna radiata ) also known as mungbean belongs to the family Fabaceae (Leguminoceae). It is a self pollinated crop with genome size 579 Mbp and is diploid (2n) with 22 chromosomes (Arumuganathan and Earle, 1991). Since it is a legume, it possess the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen (30-50 kg/ha). It is a fast growing crop with a short life span, photo-insensitive and has a dense crop canopy, these qualities gives it a special significance in crop intensification, diversification and conservation of natural resources as well as sustainability of production system. It has strategic position in Southeast Asian countries for nutritional security and as a sustainable crop. As of the 2012- 13 cultivation statistics in India, green gram was grown on 2.75 million hectares with a production status of 1.19 million tonnes and yield of 436 kg/ha (Economic Survey, 2012- 2013). Green gram is rich in easily digestible good quality protein (25.9%) and lysine (504 mg/g) for both human and animals (Saini et al., 2010). The major constraints in achieving high yield of this crop are lack of genetic variability, poor harvesting index and susceptibility to biotic and abiotic stresses. The major factor out of these remains the lack of genetic variability and non availability of suitable ideotypes for various cropping plans (Singh et al., 2013). Although the germplasm collection from India is very large, much diversity has not been reported in morphological characters. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify genetic divergence based on morpho-molecular basis for utilization in breeding programmes. There are numerous techniques available for assessing the genetic variability and relatedness among crop germplasm. Several studies have shown that DNA markers have many advantages over morphological markers (Bernatzky et al.1989 and Gepts et al.1993). Estimation of the genetic variation in green gram has been carried out using various molecular markers that includes RAPD (Santalla et al. 1998, Afzal et al. 2004, Lavanya et al. 2008, Saini et al. 2010, Undal et al. 2011, Sony et al. 2012 and Bhuyan et al. 2014), AFLP (Bhat et al. 2005), ISSR (Reddy et al. 2008) and SSR (Gwag et al. 2010, Gena et al. 2015). For simple, efficient and economic way of cultivar identification and diversity analysis RAPD-PCR based DNA finger printing has widely used (Gherardi et al ., 1998). RAPD markers have the advantage that they are random and do not require any prior sequence information for implementation. RAPDs are generated by PCR amplification using single, short, synthetic, random oligonucleotide as a primers that acts both as forward as well as reverse primer (Yadav et al., 2014). RAPD analysis can be mostly used to reveal genetic relationship between genotypes of a species (Bhuyan et al, 2014). DNA markers such as RAPD provides a direct