USE OF RAPD AND ISSR MARKERS FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF EGYPTIAN HENBANE (Hyoscyamus muticus L.) GENOTYPES

Abstract

Medicinal plants have acquired increasing significance over the last few years, not only because their healing ability, but also due to their minor side effects comparing to the chemical medicine. Worldwide, 35000 plant species are used for medicinal purposes but only 90 species are considered in the most important industrial medicines. In developing countries traditional medicine is spread because natural remedies are cheaper than chemical medicine and are often the only medicine available in the remote rural area. Besides serving medicinal functions, medicinal plants in developing countries have an important economic role because they have 90% of the earth genetic diversity exists in the developing countries.
Family Solanaceae is one of the most intriguing plant families in the world not only because it is one of the largest families in plant kingdom with more than 3,000 species. Also, because it includes species which are essential for life such as Hyoscyamus muticus (an important medicinal plant of the Solanaceous family).
The Solanaceae is known for possessing a diverse range of alkaloidal glucosides, or simply alkaloids. One of the most important groups of these compounds is called the tropane alkaloids. Hyoscyamus plants have been known from ancient time as a remedy for various diseases, and serve today as a source of their pharmaceutically active constituents; the tropane alkaloids. The medicinal importance of scopolamine, hyoscyamine and atropine is illustrated by their presence in the list of the ten substances of plant origin most used as drugs in the USA in the 1973.
Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers and inter - simple sequence repeats (ISSR) markers are two molecular approaches that have been used to detect variation among plants. Each method has been used extensively to identify and determine relationships at the species and cultivar levels (Rajaseger et al., 1997; Raina et al., 2001; Martins et al., 2003). These methods are widely applicable because they are rapid, inexpensive, simple to perform, do not
require prior knowledge of DNA sequence and require very little starting DNA template (Esselman et al., 1999). The ISSR method has been reported to produce more complex marker patterns than the RAPD approach (Parsons et al.,
1997). In addition, ISSR markers are more reproducible than RAPD markers, because ISSR primers, designed to anneal to a micro-satellite sequence, are longer than RAPD primers, allowing higher annealing temperatures to be used (Goulao and Oliveira, 2001).