Prakash et al.

characters like the leaves, flowers, fruits etc. According to Koidzumi (1917),

mulberry has 24 species and a variety under species. The classification of Indian

varieties of mulberry as in other countries is also not clear. Brandis (1874) described

four species, Morus alba Linn., M. laevigata ( M. glabrata Wall.), M. Indica and

M. serrata Roxb. ( M. pabularia Dacne). Hooker (1885) recorded M. indica Linn.,

M. serrata Roxb., and M. laevigata Wall, and M. atropurpurea Roxb., a chinese

species, closely allied to Morus alba . Several varieties like V-1, S-1, S-36, K-2,

S-13, S30, Mysore Local, C-776 etc. are being cultivated in the country. Most of

the Indian varieties of mulberry belong to M. indica or M. alba.

Mulberry is a perennial, heterozygous, dioecious and cross-pollinated tree plant.

Genetic improvement of mulberry cultivars by adopting the conventional breeding

methods, like other agricultural or horticultural plants, is not been so successful

because of meager genetic information for important economical traits and their

linkages. Typical constraints associated with tree crop like long reproductive

cycle, difficulty in characterization and non-availability of genetic information are

hindering the success of mulberry important. Homozygous lines are not available

consequently very little is known about the inheritance pattern in mulberry.

As a result, the selection of parents for hybridization has become increasingly

difficult. Identification of divergent parents for hybridization programme through

conventional method has not yielded satisfactory results. Morphological traits

cannot serve as an unambiguous marker because of environmental influence (Wang

andTanksley,1989).So,thereisaneedtoapplyrecentbiotechnologicalapproaches,

which can help to overcome the problems and give acceleration and directionality

to the mulberry variety improvement efforts. The field of biotechnology has a wide

expense of strong potentiality in achieving good nutrition, high leaf potentiality of

mulberry and a biotic-abiotic stress resistance by transfer of superior gene pools

of multiple novel traits from one plant to another plant of different taxonomical

relationships. So, biotechnology is the most appropriate for scientific community

in short circuiting conventional breeding for sustainable moriculture (Chakravorty

and Suryanarayana, 1993). Employing modern molecular methods to study the

phylogenetics and consanguinity relationship in mulberry and to interpret the

genetic difference between the varieties at molecular level will be very helpful to

the geneticists and mulberry breeders.

With the development of PCR-based markers such as random amplification of

polymorphic DNA (RAPD) (Williams et al., 1990), amplified fragment length

polymorphism (AFLP) (Vos et al., 1995), microsatellite or simple sequence repeat

(SSR) (Powell et al., 1996), sequence characterized amplified region (SCARs)

(Paran and Michelmore, 1993), cleaved amplified polymorphic sequences (CAPS)

(Konieczny and Ausubel, 1993), and direct amplification of length polymorphism

(DALP) (Desmarais et al., 1998) it becomes possible to conduct rapid and efficient

polymorphism analysis of plant genomic DNAs (John et al., 1990, Lou, 1998) and

24

Int. J. Bioinformatics and Biological Sci.: v.2 n.1&2, p. 23-39. March & June 2014