Cytogenetic study of Aegopodium podagraria (Apiaceae)

Ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria) is an important plant for a number of economically valuable traits: it can be used as a food plant, excellent honey plant, and has a high feed value.
It is assumed that all parts of the plant have antirheumatic, diuretic, sedative and wound healing effects. A. podagraria is still a genetically poorly studied species: only 74 nucleotide sequences are located in the NCBI database.
In order to use the plant in breeding programs, it is necessary to carry out karyotyping of chromosomes in order to identify them using molecular cytogenetic markers.
To start molecular cytogenetic studies of A. podagraria chromosomes, we gathered a unique collection of 82 A. podagraria plants from 41 locations in Russia.
The length of the expedition route was 24,000 km.
A large number of qualitative cytological slides of metaphase chromosomes for all studied individual plants of A. podagraria were obtained using the method developed by our team.
Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) with ribosomal DNA fragments on A. podagraria chromosomes followed by staining was performed for accurate karyotyping.
It was found by microscopy that the number of A. podagraria chromosomes from the collection is 2n=42, which differs from the data obtained by other researchers.
Karyotyping of A. podagraria was performed by using the software DRAWID. Localization of rDNA fragments helped to distinguish some chromosomes with similar length and centromeric index.

IV International Symposium on Horticulture in Europe – SHE2021

D.V. Romanov, S.Y. Shirnin, G.I. Karlov, M.G. Divashuk

FISH, cytogenetic marker, ground elder, metaphase, karyotype, chromosome, idiogram

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2021.1327.4