Phylogeny of Curcuma spp. using morphological and molecular markers

The family Zingiberaceae is the largest of the eight families in the order Zingiberales, with 53 genera and over 1377 species. They are mainly distributed in tropics and subtropics with the centre of distribution in the Indo-Malayan region, but extending through tropical Africa to central and South In India it is represented by 21 genera and about 180 species. The genetic variability of 19 Curcuma species 40 random primers and 10 ISSR primers were used. Twenty random decamer RAPD primers developed polymorphic banding pattern and produced a total of 2226 scorable bands in the 19 species of Curcuma studied out of which 1025 were polymorphic. The percentage of polymorphism ranged from a maximum of 56.7% to a minimum of 36.5% within the species. The seven ISSR primers studied, produced 800 bands and out of which 424 were polymorphic, the percentage polymorphism ranged from 60.78% to 48.14%.