Analysis of Genetic Diversity of Sago Palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottb.) in West Kalimantan Province, Indonesia Using SSR Markers

Background and Objective: Sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottb.) is one of the largest carbohydrate-producing plants in the world. SSR has an essential role in the genome and is widely used to determine plant diversity compared to other molecular markers. This research focused on identifying the diversity of sago palms in the West Kalimantan region using SSR markers. The benefit of this research is to obtain EST-SSR information on sago palms that can be used to design SSR primers so that it can be used to study the diversity of sago populations in the West Kalimantan Region. Materials and Methods: DNA isolation was obtained by extracting young leaves of sago palms originating from West Kalimantan. The DNA concentration and quality were measured using Nanodrop. SSR amplification using PCR was carried out on sago palm accessions with polymorphic primers from sago accession selection. Results: DNA concentration measurements were 33.8-1380.3 ng μL–1 and DNA purity was 1.8. The results of the SSR analysis using seven primers on 27 sago accessions produced an average number of alleles and the percentage of polymorphic primers 3.57 and 0.538, respectively. The highest number of alleles and PICs produced by sV2006 primers are 5 and 0.721. Analysis of the diversity of 27 accessions of sago with seven primers in the form of phylogenetic trees forming three different groups. Conclusion: There was a high diversity of 37 accessions of sago Kalimantan in our study with 7 primers and the phylogenetic trees formed three groups. The sago accession from West Kalimantan has different variations between Pontianak and the accession from Mempawah, while the accession from Sambas has several similarities with Mempawah and Singkawang.