Identification of Melissa officinalis subspecies by DNA fingerprinting

The random amplified polymorphic DNA analysis (RAPD) is a method to study g enetic variability within and between populations and species on the basis of the amplification of anonymous fragments from genomic DNA templates by m eans of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We applied RAPD analysis in order to distinguish medicinal plant subspecies at the level of their genomes. In this study we investigated various samples of two Melissa subspecies and s howed that RAPD analysis is a fast and reliable method to distinguish subsp ecies on the pharmaceutical market that have been previously classified acc ording to the distribution pattern of compounds present in the lemon balm o il.