الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract In the present investigation, an extensive study was conducted to address the morphological and molecular characterization of seventeen Ficus species, thirty-five common fig (Ficus carica L.), and seven sycomorus fig (Ficus sycomorus L.) samples grown in Egypt in order to be preserved in the Gene Bank. The morphological characterization was conducted according to the Fig (Ficus carica) IPGRI descriptor (2003). The seventeen Ficus species were morphologically characterized using twenty leaf characters, while, the molecular characterization was conducted using 15 SSR primer pairs, 7 AFLP primer combinations and 2 DNA barcoding loci (rbcL and matK). The one-way ANOVA test for the four measured morphological traits showed significant differences among the seventeen species. F. microcarpa Hawai showed the lowest value for both leaf length and leaf width, while, the highest leaf length and leaf width were revealed by F. hispida and F. carica, respectively. Moreover, most of the leaf descriptive characters showed variability among the studied species, and F. carica possessed the distinctive unique descriptive character of leaf lobation. The seven AFLP primer combinations amplified 622 amplicons, while, the fifteen SSR primers revealed 76 alleles. Although the percentage of polymorphism detected by SSRs (98.68%) was comparable to that of AFLPs (98.49%) however, only 10 species were characterized by 16 SSR unique positive markers. On the other hand, the AFLP markers amplified 100 unique positive/negative markers and were able to identify each of the seventeen species |