Evaluation of clonal fidelity of in vitro raised plants of Guadua angustifolia Kunth using DNA-based markers

Guadua angustifolia Kunth a large and multipurpose bamboo has extensive utility in pharmaceutical, paper, charcoal, and construction industries. Therefore, it is pertinent to scale up their production through micropropagation technique. This would enable us to meet the growing demand for quality planting material. Although, the common practice to use axillary bud method allows large-scale production, there are always possibilities of somaclonal variations which appear in in vitro cultures due to its rapid multiplication. Therefore, we utilized random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and intersimple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers in in vitro raised Guadua clones to assure their genetic fidelity. We screened 30 RAPD and 27 ISSR primers, and found 15 RAPD and 17 ISSR markers to produce clear, reproducible and scorable bands. We found 15 RAPD primers which produced 84 distinct bands with an average of 5.6 bands per primer. In addition, we found 17 ISSR primers which produced 61 distinct bands in the size range of 300 to 2500 bp. All banding profiles from micropropagated plants were monomorphic and similar to those of the mother plant, thus ascertaining the true nature of the in vitro raised plants