Retrotransposons And Their Use As Molecular Markers In Eucayptus species

Retrotransposons (RTEs) are  a major component in most plant genomes, and molecular markers based on LTR retrotransposon insertions are commonly used in evolutionary studies, as well as genotype identification. However, despite the development and evaluation of several molecular markers in the Eucalyptus genus, RTE-based markers have not been already reported for this genus. In this work, we investigated retrotransposon-based polymorphisms in five different Eucalyptus species (Eucalyptus brassiana, E. grandis, E. saligna, E. tereticornis and E. urophylla)  using Inter-retrotransposon amplified polymorphisms (IRAPs) . The analysis based of six LTR RTEs primers with IRAP technique generated 740 scoreable bands ranging from 250 to 2,000 bp. There were 177 polymorphic bands with an average of 16.9 polymorphic bands/primer. CoEu1-5 and CoEu7-3 primers were the most effective in IRAP technique, generating 74 bands, with 21 and 28 polymorphic bands, respectively.  The most polymorphic specie was Eucalyptus grandis with 4.63 fragments per primer, and Eucalyptus urophylla a low number of polymorphic bands. Further analyses will provide resources for the use of retrotransposon-based markers in Eucalyptus genotyping.

 Financial Support: CNPq