Of Mice and Humans

Background: The impact of diseases such as Phytophthora foot rot and the replacement of unproductive cultivars by high yielding ones has brought about the disappearance of varieties in Piper species, like any other crop. Black pepper (King of spices), is a major spice crop consumed throughout the world. It is widely cultivated across various parts of the world apart from India. The different cultivars may be genetically related and could be a source of valuable genes for disease resistance and an increase in quantity and quality. Even though Western Ghats in India is believed to be the site of origin of this crop, numerous accessions from the NBPGR have not yet been evaluated. Our study aims to investigate the genetic relatedness in major cultivars of black pepper using Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism. Results: Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphic (AFLP) DNA analysis was performed in thirty popular cultivars of black pepper from National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR), India. Fingerprint profiles were generated initially with, five different primer combinations, from which three primer pair combinations (EAGC/MCAA, EAGG/MCTA and EAGC/MCTG) gave consistent and scorable banding patterns. From 173 scorable markers, 158(> 90%) were polymorphic which shows there is considerable variation in the available germplasm. The dendrogram derived by unweighted pair group method analysis (UPGMA) grouped the accessions into three major clusters and four diverse cultivars with only 30% similarity. Karimunda, a widely grown and popular cultivar was unique in the fingerprint profiles obtained. Conclusion: There are currently few fingerprinting studies using the valuable spice crop black pepper. We found considerable genetic variability among cultivars of black pepper. Fingerprinting analysis with AFLP proved to be an ideal tool for cultivar identification and phylogenetic studies. It shows the high level of polymorphism and the unique characterization of the major cultivars. An extensive range of similarity value between the cultivars was noted (6.01 to 98.13). Further screening of more cultivars will provide valuable information for current breeding programmes. Background The Piper genus includes the most valuable economically important spice crop, black pepper (Piper nigrum L) the 'King of Spices' which is consumed throughout the world. Apart from Asian countries such as Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and SriLanka, it is also Published: 29 June 2007 BMC Genetics 2007, 8:42 doi:10.1186/1471-2156-8-42 Received: 3 October 2006 Accepted: 29 June 2007 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/8/42 © 2007 Joy et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.