ASPECTS OF GENETIC DIVERSITY OF SILVER LIME (TILIA TOMENTOSA MOENCH.) POPULATIONS IN NATURAL FORESTS OF WESTERN ROMANIA

References: 17th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2017, www.sgemviennagreen.org, SGEM2017 Vienna GREEN Conference Proceedings, ISBN 978-619-7408-27-0 / ISSN 1314-2704, 27 - 29 November, 2017, Vol. 17, Issue 33, 473-480 pp; DOI: 10.5593/sgem2017H/33/S14.059

ABSTRACT

The populations of the native silver lime species (Tilia tomentosa Moench.), one of the most important forest tree species in Western Romania, Caransebes area, show strong vitality and a large morphologic variability. The present carried out research would like to contribute to explaining some aspects of the genetic diversity. The extension of silver lime, during the last decades, in the Caransebes area natural forests (by natural regeneration) seems to be a visible issue in the present-day climate change context. The social values of the silver lime are also important in the researched area making the silver lime a “tree of future” both in natural forest and in urban areas. The genetic polymorfism rate was analyzed for twenty provenances of silver lime populations using ISSR (inter simple sequence repeats) primers, considering the advantages of the method. Inter-microsatellite markers are dominant molecular markers, based on PCR (polymerase chain reaction), do not require prior information about the genome and lead to high polymorphism, they are relatively abundant in the genome, highly accurate and display good reproducibility. Ten dominant primers of ISSR were used in this study and the results revealed 232 bands, of which 226 were polymorphic. Unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) cluster analysis revealed that the groups of silver lime populations have high genetic similarity, supporting the hypothesis that the silver lime provenances belong to that same population which cover a large area in the region.

Keywords: silver lime; morphologic variability, genetic diversity; UPGMA