Determination of Genetic Diversity of Some Sage Species Collected From Eastern Mediterranean Region

Abstract

Sage (Salvia spp.) is the most important and largest genus of the Lamiaceae family, and the popularity among medical plants is increasing. Sage plant is widely used in pharmaceutical, food and spice industries and as tea by many people. The fact that the plant may be marketed after being collected uncontrollably from the nature threatens its future. Therefore, it is necessary to put these species under protection and to start breeding projects as well to do genetic characterization of them. For this purpose, in the study, 11 different sage species from the Eastern Mediterranean region were collected and genetic differences among species were determined using SRAP (Sequence dependent replicated polymorphism) markers. As the result of our experiments, average polymorphism content, allele number and polymorphism information content (PIC) of the species were calculated as 90.91%, 4.2 and 0.91, respectively. The PIC values ranged from 0.04 to 0.99. While the average genetic difference among species was determined as 43.15%, the highest genetic difference, which was between Salvia aucheri spp. aucheri and Salvia aramiensis, was found to be 61.46%. The least genetic difference, on the other hand, was detected between Salvia tomentosa and Salvia hypergeia species with 22.62% similarity. Additionally, according to the observations made through the study, the SRAP markers we used were thought to be reliable for the genetic characterization of sage species. In breeding programs where interspecies dissimilarities are considered, selecting parental species with high genetic differences will increase the success.