Identification of Salicornia population: anatomical characterization and RAPD fingerprinting

Anatomical and Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis of two typical populations of Salicornia europaea from Montenegro and Greece (Lesvos), one typical population of S. ramosissima from Spain and one population that belongs to the Salicornia genus from Serbia, was undertaken to develop a new strategy for identifying Salicornia plants. Anatomical variability and differentiation were examined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multivariate Discriminant Function Analysis (MDA). On the basis of the anatomical measurements, the four populations were classified into three groups: one joining the plants from Serbia and Spain, one comprising the Montenegrin group and one comprising the Lesvos group. RAPD analysis indicated that populations from Spain and Serbia were closely related to each other and the Lesvos group was quite different from all the other investigated populations. These results opened up the possibility that the specimens from Serbia belonged to S. ramosissima and not to S. europaea, as reported previously.