Abstract:

Ginger(Zingiber officinale) is an important spice crop grown in India. The North-East region is rich in ginger germplasm and several genotypes are cultivated in the region. Meghalaya is the major producre of ginger in the region, which is also the second largest producer in the country with total share of 19.59%. The majority of genotypes collected for this study are traditional landraces.Due to the lack of quality planting material which is free from systemic infections of diseases like rhizome rot, there is a need to develop in vitro micropropagation protocol suitable for the local ginger genotypes. This will lead to rapid multiplication and availability of disease-free quality planting material. Also, there is a need to characterize the local germplasm,some of which have economic and therapeutic value, and to analyze their genetic diversity for future crop improvement. The present investigation was carried out to determine the amenability of locally grown ginger to micropropagation and to find out the most appropriate hormonal concentrations for in vitro callus induction and regenaration of ginger, and also to investigate the relatedness of the different ginger genotypes based on DNA markers viz. SSR,RAPD and ISSR. Out of fiur genotypes studied for micropropagation only two i.e. Nadia and Ingbah were found to be responsive. The highest percentage of callus induction was observed in India with the hormone concentration of 3:1 BAP:NAA. However, reagents from induced calli could not be recovered. The 8 SSR markers used in this study were found to be monomorphic across all the 11 genotypes. 17 RAPD markers produced a total of 93 bands of which 47 were polymorphic(50.5% polymorphism). A total of 12 ISSR markers were found to be most suitable as they were able to differentiate between all genotypes except Jamaica and Khasi local. the concensus similarity co-efficient was found to be highest between Jamaica and Khasi local (0.993) and lowest between Mookyndur and Tura Local(0.619). The correlation co-efficient between RAPD and the concensus matrices and correlation coefficient between the ISSR and the concensus matrices were significantly very high , 0.986 and 0.981 respectively.