DETECTION OF DNA POLYMORPHISMS IN THE GENUS KALANCHOE BY RAPD-PCR FINGERPRINT AND ITS RELATIONSHIPS TO INFRAGENERIC TAXONOMIC POSITION AND ECOPHYSIOLOGICAL PHOTOSYNTHETIC BEHAVIOR OF THE SPECIES

The genus Kalanchoe plays an important role in the investigation of bi ochemical, ecophysiological and evolutionary aspects of Crassulacean a cid metabolism (CAM), an adaptationally relevant modification of the p hotosynthetic carbon assimilation pathway. In order to obtain more inf ormation to answer the question whether or not within the genus the mo dality of CAM performance is related to phylogenetic trends, we have a pplied RAPD-PCR analysis to compare 30 selected Kalanchoe species with ten 10-mer synthetic oligonucleotides having been used to amplify mul tiple PCR products with genomic DNA as template. The different plants were scored for presence and absence of defined RAPD-fragments and gro uped by distance analysis using a simple matching coefficient of simil arity. Four primers which amplified between eight and 16 distinct frag ments (52 informative sites building an average of 13 bands) were fina lly chosen for data analysis allowing us to generate dendrograms with the 'neighbor joining' - and UPGMA-methods. Both methods resulted in n early identical dendrograms showing that within the genus Kalanchoe th e species form three main clusters which coincide well with the three infrageneric groups of species distinguishable by their mode of CAM pe rformance and by classical taxonomic criteria. In contrast to the curr ent critical discussion of the applicability of thee RRAPD-fingerprint ing method for taxonomical studies our results suggest that RAPD techn ology is in fact a rapid and sensitive technique providing a useful to ol for studying plant phylogenetic relationships at the infragenetic l evel. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.