A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON GENETIC ANALYSIS AND PURITY ASSESSMENT OF THE GARLIC GERMPLASM AND SEED BULBS BY THE ´FINGER PRINTING´ TECHNIQUE

105 random primers have been used to screen for useful primers in the study on genetic identification and purity assessments. Twelve of them were selected and used in RAPD assay with 80 garlic cultivars and lines mainly collected from 17 provinces and regions of China and abroad. The optimum reaction system and program of temperature adjustment for PCR has been worked out and RAPD banding patterns of the garlic germplasm showed a good polymorphism and specialty. Differences in the garlic lines based on the banding patterns presented the same tendency with that by agronomic characters. By the “RAPD markered-finger-printing” test, confusions by one-garlic cultivars with different names or one name given to several garlic cultivars have been made clear and purities of several garlic cultivars were preliminarily figured out. It is depicted that the fingerprinting technique with RAPD markers will be one of the useful tools in genetic identification and purity assessments of garlic.