Discrimination Between Celery Cultivars with the Use of Rapd Markers

Screening of celery cultivars with random amplified primers is a way of avoiding mistakes in distinguishing similar genotypes. Six primers showed distinct polymorphism between the studied cultivars. The number of bands varied from 7 to 13. Suitable primers generated 52 markers of which 22 were polymorphic. A similarity matrix was created using Jaccard's coefficient. The group average method was employed to construct a dendrogram. Based on RAPD marker profiles the cultivars were grouped into three clusters coinciding with the cultivated types, var. dulce (salad celery), and var. rapaceum (turnip celery), var. secalinum (cutting celery). The salad celery entries were similar to plants of turnip celery with similarity 0.73, and the distance between genotypes of cutting celery and turnip celery was 0.68. Although only 12 cultivars have been analysed, the specific product amplified with OPX1 was observed in the three studied cultivars of cutting celery.