Genetic diversity of high-elevation populations of an endangered medicinal plant

Abstract

Intraspecific genetic variation in natural populations governs their potential to overcome challenging ecological and environmental conditions. In addition, knowledge of this variation is critical for the conservation and management of endangered plant taxa. Found in the Himalayas, Podophyllum hexandrum is an endangered highelevation plant species that has great medicinal importance. Here we report on the genetic diversity analysis of 24 P. hexandrum populations (209 individuals), representing the whole of the Indian Himalayas. In the present study, seven amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) primer pairs generated 1677 fragments, of which 866 were found to be polymorphic. Neighbour joining clustering, principal coordinate analysis and STRUCTURE analysis clustered 209 individuals from24 populations of the Indian Himalayanmountains into twomajor groups with a significantamount of gene flow (Nm = 2.13) and moderate genetic differentiation Fst(0.196), G'st(0.20). This suggests that, regardless of geographical location, all of the populations from the Indian Himalayas are intermixed and are composed broadly of two types of genetic populations. High variance partitioned within populations (80 %) suggests that most of the diversity is restricted to thewithin-population level. These results suggest two possibilities about the ancient population structure of P. hexandrum: either all of the populations in the geographical region of the Indian Himalayas are remnants of a oncewidespread ancient population, or they originated from two types of genetic populations, which coexisted a long time ago, but subsequently separated as a result of long-distance dispersal and natural selection. High variance partitioned within the populations indicates that these populations have evolved in response to their respective environments over time, but low levels of heterozygosity suggest the presence of historical population bottlenecks.