Journal of Functional and Environmental Botany

Withania somnifera is a subtropical shrub with important medicinal properties and its anti cancerous properties have been attributed to various classes of withanolide compounds. The objective of this study was to investigate the intraspecific genetic variation present in 16 individuals of W. somnifera using inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) marker technique. Twenty seven ISSR primers were used to generate fingerprints. A total number of 186 alleles were amplified. Out of 186, only 35 alleles were found monomorphic (18.9%) and 151 were polymorphic (81.1%). Average number of bands per primer was 6.88 while average number of polymorphic bands per primer was 5.59. The information about genetic variation determined from ISSR data for 16 individuals was employed to estimate similarity matrix value based on Jaccard's coefficient. The similarity values were further used to construct a phenetic dendrogram revealing the genetic relationships. The dendrogram generated by unweighted pair group method of arithmetic averages (UPGMA) distinguished different genotypes of W. somnifera and formed two major clusters.