Assessment of genetic diversity among Sargassum species from selected locations along the north-west coast of India

The present study was carried out to assess the genetic diversity of three different species of Sargassum viz., S. swartzii, S. tenerrimum and S. plagiophyllum collected from Okhaport, Malwan and Veraval respectively, along the north-west coast of India, using Inter Simple Sequence Repeats (ISSR) primer. A total of five ISSR primers, namely ISSR-807, ISSR-811, ISSR-840, ISSR-855 and ISSR-859 were used for the genetic diversity studies. A total of thirty numbers of each species were taken for the analysis. Software POPGENE version 1.32 was used to estimate the percentage of polymorphic loci (P), Nei's gene diversity (h) and genetic identity and genetic distance (D). The percentage of polymorphic loci over all the primers was 12.5% in S. swartzii, 20% in S. tenerrimum and 40% in S. plagiophyllum. The genetic diversity was comparatively less in S. swartzii (0.06) and S. tenerrimum (0.07), whereas it was 0.21 in S. plagiophyllum. Nei's genetic distance (D) was higher in all the species as expected among species of same genus.