Variability Analysis in Ginger (Zingiber officinale Rosc.) Somaclones Using ISSR Marker

Ginger (Zingiber officinale Rosc.), an important spice crop grown in India, is much valued for its flavour and medicinal properties. Crop improvement through selection and hybridization are not effective in ginger due to lack of variability and absence of natural seed set. The earlier crop improvement programmes were hence focussed on mutation breeding using  rays and ethyl methyl sulfonate (EMS). The mutants thus isolated were low yielders and the effect of mutagen treatment vanished in subsequent generations [1, 2, 3]. Hence investigations were made to induce variability in ginger through biotechnological tools like in vitro pollination and exploitation of somaclonal variation. Currently, molecular marker techniques are widely employed to detect and assess somaclonal variation in several crops as they are stable, detectable in all tissues and are not confounded by environment, pleiotropic and epistatic effects. Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR) markers can be used to assess the genetic stability of micropropogated plants like ginger [4, 5]. In addition, Inter Simple Sequence Repeats are considered useful in gene mapping studies [6, 7,8], diversity analysis in many crops including ginger [9] and somaclonal variation [10]. The variability analysis in the thirteen groups of ginger somaclones (180 Nos.) of two cultivars Maran and Rio-de-Janeiro using ISSR marker system was attempted in the present study.