Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Abstract

Contemporary phytotherapy and modern allopathic medicine use raw materials from more than 50,000 plant species. In Nigeria, the bulk of these raw materials is harvested from the wild and is diminishing at a fast rate with no substantial conservation or breeding efforts made. This alarming situation, coupled with the dramatically increased interest in herbal medicine, is a real threat to the genetic diversity of many medicinal plant species. For any meaningful progress to be made in reversing this situation, the available variation in these crops must be ascertained. Thus, this research was to document the available genetic and morphological variations in different accessions of some selected indigenous medicinal plants, (Monodora myristica and Tetrapleura tetraptera) in Southern Nigeria. Their potential uses in pharmaceutical industries were also highlighted. Efforts were made to screen available accessions in Southeastern Nigeria with a view to identifying the distribution pattern of phytochemical constituents in these accessions. Efforts were also made at estimating the level of genetic diversity in these species to stimulate the breeding of these plants. Analysis of variance showed highly significant differences (p<0.001) in many of the agronomic and nutritional attributes studied. Principal Component Analysis showed that most of the agronomic and nutritional attributes contributed significantly to the total variation of 73.04% and 79.60% recorded in M. myristica and T. tetraptera respectively. Dendrograms generated from Cluster analysis grouped the accessions of M. myristica and T. tetraptera into 3 and 4 groups respectively. Molecular analysis using RAPD markers showed 3 to 13 polymorphic bands with mean polymorphic information content (PIC) of 0.673, indicating high genetic diversity among the accessions of M. myristica. Accessions AK1, AK3 CR2 and RV4 of M. myristica and AKA3, IKM1, AKP3, AKP5 and BOK1 of T. tetraptera were identified as superior based on multiple trait performance suggesting that selection of superior accessions may be carried out for more than one trait. GRS information on these accessions is available. The high performing accessions could be key targets for exploitation by pharmaceutical companies.

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