Molecular Markers for the Evaluation of Clonal Fidelity in Medicinal Plants

Medicinal plants are major sources of secondary metabolites for which they have been paid more attention by pharmaceutical industries. In order to produce these secondary metabolites, medicinal plants are cultivated and for that plant tissue or organ, culture can be a suitable alternative. However, these plants are treated with plant hormones and elicitors to enhance the secondary metabolites and such elicitation may lead to genetic or epigenetic changes which are known as somaclonal variations. Thus, a stringent method of monitoring is required to observe the true-to-types of these medicinal plants when multiplied through tissue culture. Molecular markers like Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD), Inter-Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR), and Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) are highly suitable markers to assess clonal fidelity in micropropagated medicinal plants. In the present chapter, the execution of such markers to check somaclonal variations in tissue culture raised medicinal plants is discussed in detail.

Keywords: Clonal fidelity, ISSR, Medicinal plants, Micropropagation, Molecular markers, Organ culture, Plant tissue, RAPD, SSR, Simple sequence repeats, Somaclonal variations, Tissue culture, True-to-type plants.