Molecular markers as a tool to verify sexual and apomictic off-spring of intraspecific crosses in Hypericum perforatum

The aim of this project was to establish RAPD markers to determine the perc entage of sexual off-spring of the facultative apomictic plant species H. p erforatum. We did reciprocal crosses between four different accessions (A x B, B x A, C x D, D x C) by mechanical emasculation and hand pollination. G enomic DNA of the parents and the off-spring was isolated and PCR condition s were optimized in order to obtain reproducible bands with RAPD markers. O f the 260 screened RAPD primers 127 revealed polymorphism between the paren tal lines of A and B, whereas 53 revealed no amplification products. Each p rogeny was tested for the presence of paternal bands with three primers. We found no sexual off-spring among the 22 progenies of A x B, the nine proge nies of B x A and the ten progenies of D x C. However, we detected six sexu al off-spring among the 45 progenies of C x D. We have proved that RAPD mar kers can be used to distinguish between sexual and apomictic off-spring in H. perforatum and that sexual off-spring can be obtained from intraspecific crosses. The percentage of sexual progeny might depend on the genotype of the parental lines.