Study of Genetic Variation among Some Wild Landraces of Zingiber officinale Roscoe Correlated with Their Antioxidant Potential Status

DNA fingerprinting based genotype characterization and assessment of genetic diversity of fifteen wild landraces of Zingiber officinale. Roscoe, collected from different parts of northern West Bengal, India, has been done using 16 random decamer primers. Out of 117 amplified products, 97 bands showed polymorphism (82.90%) and an average of 7.5 bands was amplified per primer. The genetic similarity coefficients among accessions ranged from 0.673 to 0.912 with an average of 0.792. Cluster analysis based on Jaccard’s similarity coefficient using UPGMA grouped the landraces into three clusters: cluster I consisting of 5 landraces, Cluster II consisting of 6 landraces, and cluster III of 4 landraces; Antioxidant potential status of these genotypes exhibit variation that shows grouping comparable with the RAPD based dendogram (reflecting genetic relatedness) of the landraces.