Distinction between cold-sensitive and -tolerant jute by DNA polymorphisms

Jute is the principal coarse fiber for commercial production and use in Bangladesh. Therefore, the development of a high-yielding and environmental-stress tolerant jute variety would be beneficial for the agro economy of Bangladesh. Two molecular fingerprinting techniques, random-amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and amplified-fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) were applied on six jute samples. Two of them were cold-sensitive varieties and the remaining four were cold-tolerant accessions. RAPD and AFLP fingerprints were employed to generate polymorphism between the cold-sensitive varieties and cold-tolerant accessions because of their simplicity, and also because there is no available sequence information on jute. RAPD data were obtained by using 30 arbitrary oligonucleotide primers. Five primers were found to give polymorphism between the varieties that were tested. AFLP fingerprints were generated using 25 combinations of selective-amplification primers. Eight primer combinations gave the best results with 93 polymorphic fragments, and they were able to discriminate the two cold-sensitive and four cold-tolerant jute populations. A cluster analysis, based on the RAPD and AFLP fingerprint data, showed the population-specific grouping of individuals. This information could be useful later in marker-aided selection between the cold-sensitive varieties and cold-tolerant jute accessions.