Genetic analysis and marker assisted identification of life phases of red alga Gracilaria corticata (J. Agardh).

The present study firstly reports the cytological and molecular marker assisted differentiation of isomorphic population of Gracilaria corticata (J. Agardh) with inter and intra-phasic genetic diversity analysis using ISSR markers. The genetic diversity of inbreeding population of G. corticata as determined in terms of percentage of polymorphic loci (PPL), average heterozygosity (He) and Shannon's Weaver index (I) were 59.80, 0.59 and 1.21, respectively. The inter-phasic pair-wise average polymorphism were found to be 31.6% between male and female, 24.0% in male and tetrasporophyte and 25.3% in female and tetrasporophyte. The intra-phasic average polymorphisms were calculated as a maximum of 5.5% between females, 4.2% between males and the lowest 2.4% between tetrasporophytes. The primer 10 generated a marker of 800 bp specific to male and 650 bp to female gametophyte, while the primer 17 generated a marker of 2,500 bp specific to tetrasporophyte. Both the UPGMA based dendrogram and PCA analysis clustered all the three life phases differentially as distinct identity. Cytological analysis by chromosome count revealed 24 chromosomes in both haploid male and female gametophytes (N) and 48 for diploid (2 N) tetrasporophyte further confirming their genetic distinctness. The life phase specific markers reported in this study could be of help in breeding programmes where differentiation of life phases at the early developmental stages is crucial.