Comparative analysis of DNA polymorphisms and phylogenetic relationships among Syzygium cumini Skeels based on phenotypic characters and RAPD technique

The Indian black berry (Syzygium cumini Skeels) has a great nutraceutical and medicinal properties. As in other fruit crops, thefruit characteristics are important attributes for differentiation were also determined for different accessions of S. cumini. The fruitweight, length, breadth, length: breadth ratio, pulp weight, pulp content, seed weight and pulp: seed ratio significantly varied indifferent accessions. Molecular characterization was carried out using PCR based RAPD technique. Out of 80 RAPD primers, only18 primers produced stable polymorphisms that were used to examine the phylogenetic relationship. A sum of 207 loci weregenerated out of which 201 loci found polymorphic. The average genetic dissimilarity was 97 per cent among jamun accessions.The phylogenetic relationship was also determined by principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) that explained 46.95 per centcumulative variance. The two-dimensional PCoA analysis showed grouping of the different accessions that were plotted into foursub-plots, representing clustering of accessions. The UPGMA (r = 0.967) and NJ (r = 0.987) dendrogram constructed based on thedissimilarity matrix revealed a good degree of fit with the cophenetic correlation value. The dendrogram grouped the accessionsinto three main clusters according to their eco-geographical regions which given useful insight into their phylogeneticrelationships.