IDENTIFICATION OF GENETIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INDONESIAN BANANA CULTIVARS AND THE WILD RELATIVES USING DNA BARCODES

There are several studies on the DNA barcoding of banana worldwide, however studies on the DNA barcoding of Indonesian bananas are limited. This study aims to develop a DNA reference library of the Indonesian banana species, varieties and cultivars to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, and to identify and understand genetic relationships between varieties and cultivars using three barcoding markers (rbcL, matK and trnL-F). A total of 26 accessions of banana were amplified and sequenced using these primers. Maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum parsimony (MP) were conducted on these sequences with addition of 9 accessions (rbcL), 13 accessions (matK) and 14 accessions (trnL-F) from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank. The aligned sequences were measured for genetic distances. The results showed that all markers were significant to differentiate among the A and B genomes. All markers resulted in a tree that contained two distinctive clades supported by high bootstrap value (>50%). The rbcL marker was the most conserved, followed by matK and trnL-F. The rbcL marker can only be used to distinguish generic level, while matK and trnL-F can be used at species level. All markers cannot be used to identify subspecific, variety and cultivar levels. However, the markers are able to suggest the genome of the maternal parent.