MORPHOLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR ANALYSIS OF INTRACULTIVAR VARIATION IN INDIAN MANGO (MANGIFERA INDICA L.) CULTIVARS

The genetic diversity of five commercially important mango cultivars of India, comprising three landraces (‘Banganapalli’, ‘Dashehri’, and ‘Langra’) and two recently-bred cultivars (‘Amrapali’ and ‘Mallika’) was investigated using morphological and molecular inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers. Morphological analysis based on 17 fruit characters detected prominent variation in the landraces ‘Banganapalli’, ‘Langra’, and ‘Dashehri’ and some variation in the cultivar ‘Mallika’. Using ten ISSR repeat primers, intracultivar variation was detected among replicates of ‘Banganapalli’, ‘Langra’, and ‘Mallika’, while replicates of ‘Amrapali’ and ‘Dashehri’ showed no variation. The 20 replicates of ‘Mallika’ showed four distinct fingerprints differing from each other in the presence or absence of five bands all produced by a single primer, 5’HVH(TCC)₅3’. In ‘Langra’, all but one replicate had identical molecular fingerprints while in the 15 ‘Banganapalli’, four different fingerprints were identified. Some replicates showed both morphological and molecular differences from the other replicates of the respective cultivars suggesting a molecular basis of the observed morphological variation. ‘Neelum’, one of the parents of ‘Amrapali’ and ‘Mallika’ was included in the study to understand genetic relationship with its hybrids. The implications of intracultivar variation on variety protection in mango and cataloguing of genetic diversity are discussed.