Abstract: Dipsacus L., a member of Dipsacaceae, is an important plant for the traditional herbal medicine in China. But there is still inaccurate identification in the botanical origin and genetic relatedness of Dipsacus plant. We used ten highly polymorphic ISSR(Inter-simple sequence repeat) markers to assess the genetic relatedness of ten accessions of Dipsacus, and used ten highly polymorphic ISSR primers from 100 primers screened to conduct PCR amplification with the genomic DNA isolated from ten accessions of Dipsacus. A total of 947 DNA bands were produced, of which 828 were polymorphic(87.2%) among ten accessions, and Dipsacus plant had abundant genetic variation. The Nei’s genetic coefficient ranged in 0.557 0.806 with an average of 0.661. By UPGMA cluster, ten Dipsacus accessions were grouped into two main groups(Group 1 and Group 2 ) with a similarity level of 0.582 and then into five subgroups at the similarity level of 0.702. Group 1 contained DL(L), DL(W), DL(H), DL(WS), ES, RB, C(J) and C(D) and was further divided into three subgroups(Subgroup 1, Subgroup 2 and Subgroup 3) and Group 2 consisted of DT and SZ, which was distance from any other accessions and constituted a separate minor subgroup(Subgroup 4 and Subgroup 5), respectively. Subgroup 1 contained DL(L), DL(W), DL(H) and DL(WS), Subgroup 2 with ES and RB and Subgroup 3 with C(J) and C(D), which indicated that the genetic relationship among them was very close and the gene flow among them was frequent. The results of principle coordinate analysis(PCA) were consistent with those of the UPGMA analysis. The distance between ES and RB was extremely narrow(0.210), which showed that RB and ES had a close relationship between them. The geographical distributions of them had overlapped intensively. The molecular cluster result corresponded to the morphology analysis. The results also showed that ES may be a variant of RB.

Key words: Dipsacus plant, ISSR markers, genetic relatedness