Determination of relationships and genetic variation among Amorphophallus sp. from northern part of Thailand

Amorphophallu sp. are known under the common name of konjac or elephant foot yam. Some of the species have potential to become highly profitable crops for South East Asia as raw material for various industries. However, considerable variation in morphological features of many species of Amorphophallus makes it is difficult to identify them in the vegetative form. Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and DNA Sequencing are often used to determine the genetic relationship of plants. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship and genetic variation of various accessions of Amorphophallus sp. collected in northern regions of Thailand. Fifty samples were characterised by RAPD with four primers (ERIC1R, ERIC 2, BOXA1R, RPO1) the data from which were used to calculate genetic distances which were then visualized using multidimensional scaling. In addition, the psbM-trnD region of their chloroplast genome was also sequenced from which phylogenetic relationships were determined using parsimony analysis. The results from the RAPD analysis placed the accessions into 35 different groups with distance values between 0.075 and 0.949. The DNA sequence data found the accessions into 30 different groups. Further work will be carried out to more closely determine the relationships between the accessions and to relate them to each other.