Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Crops & Products journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/indcrop Molecular diversity assessed amongst high dry rhizome recovery Ginger germplasm (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) from NE-India using RAPD and ISSR markers Joyashree Baruah a,b,1 , Sudin Kumar Pandey a,b , Twahira Begum b , Neelav Sarma b , Manabi Paw b , Mohan Lal b, ⁎ ,1 a AcSIR-Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, India b Medicinal Aromatic & Economic Plants Group, Biological Sciences & Technology Division, CSIR-Northeast Institute of Science & Technology, Jorhat, 785 006, Assam, India ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Ginger Molecular markers RAPD ISSR Breeding programme ABSTRACT Zingiber officinale Roscoe commonly known as ginger is one of the most important spice crop of North East India. This plant has found a wide range of application- as condiments and spice, as favouring agent, in medicine and as therapeutic uses in pharmaceuticals industries. Diferent varieties of Zingiber officinale are cultivated in this region but their identifcation is still lacking till now. Evaluation of genetic diversity is therefore essential for conservation, to avoid duplicity of germplasm and maintenance of this important species. Molecular markers Randomly Amplifed Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and Inter Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) are tested for eighty high dry recovery genotypes. Selections of genotypes are based on more than 25% dry rhizome recovery. Among 90 primers (40 RAPD and 50 ISSR) initially tested, 26 RAPD and 28 ISSR are used in the study which showed 84.1% and 85.2% polymorphism respectively. Dendrogram generated from UPGMA (Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean) cluster analysis for both RAPD and ISSR marker was similar. Similar conclusion can be drawn from the result of cluster analysis. These primers could be used for future studies as varietal developmental programme on high dry rhizome recovery lines. 1. Introduction Zingiber officinale Roscoe (commonly known as ginger) of the family Zingiberaceae is one of the most economically important plant species, valued all over the world for its varied uses. This plant has got diferent medicinal properties like anti-diabetic (Chopra et al., 1956; Mascolo et al., 1989; Munda et al., 2018), antioxidant (Chen et al., 1986; Gosh and Mandi, 2011), anti-infammatory, antibacterial (Mohanty and Panda, 1994; Nayak et al., 2005). Ginger extract also posses high per- centage of α-Zingiberene, β-sesquiphellandrene, (E,E)- α-farnesene, geranial and ar-curcumene as major components, which are sources of pesticides, anti-infammatory and antifungal properties (Koch et al., 2017). It has been used as condiments and spice and in traditional medicine by the people of Asia since long time. According to Spice Board (2007), ginger produced in North East region is reported to have high oil and oleoresin content than other parts of India and accounts for 72% of India’s ginger production. It is also one of the highest ginger productivity areas in the world. Thus North Eastern Region as a whole can be regarded as “ginger treasury house” (Rahman et al., 2009). There are diferent species of ginger available in North Eastern Region which is used for various purposes. Of these Zingiber officinale is most commonly preferred. The consumption of ginger is increasing worldwide day by day. As fresh ginger is available seasonally, it is dried at a temperature of 45 °C so that it can be stored for a long term and termed as dry ginger. High dry ginger means the ginger which gives high biomass after drying. Although India is the largest ginger producing country in the world, China is leading in dry ginger exports to European countries, followed by Brazil and Thailand. Indian markets failed to reach the standard either because of poor marketing or may be due to failure in production of dry ginger than needed. (CBI Ministry of Foreign Afairs, 2017). So the current market should focus on increasing the dry ginger yield to fulfl the demand. Ginger is believed to be originated in South East Asia, probably https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indcrop.2018.12.037 Received 7 September 2018; Received in revised form 7 December 2018; Accepted 11 December 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: MAEP Group, BSTD, CSIR-NEIST, Jorhat, Assam, India. E-mail address: mohan@neist.res.in (M. Lal). 1 Joyashree Baruah and last author Mohan Lal has equal contribution for preparing the MS. Industrial Crops & Products 129 (2019) 463–471 0926-6690/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T