Genetic diversity of the ornamental plant Anthurium andraeanum in Vietnam

Anthurium sp. is an imported ornamental plant with high economic value in Vietnam. Consumer preferences and demand depend greatly on the colour of the spathes, so understanding the genetic diversity of varieties is necessary to create novel flowers. In this work, we aimed to characterise genetic diversity among Anthurium accessions collected from four provinces in Vietnam (Ha Noi, Thua Thien Hue, Lam Dong and Can Tho). DNA of eighteen Anthurium accessions was extracted using the cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) method. Then, genomic DNA was amplified with matK and rbcL primers in PCR and sequencing to determine sequence parameters using DNAsp v6 and MEGA11 software. Three phylogenetic trees including the Neighborjoining (NJ) tree, Maximum likelihood (ML) tree and Bayesian inference (BI) tree were created to separate Anthurium accessions. In addition, ten morphological traits were also described and were cluster-analysed (UPGMA) using MVSP v3.22 software. The matK yielded the highest diversity information with 54 variable (polymorphic) sites, 52 parsimony informative sites, 6 Insertion-Deletion (InDel) sites and nucleotide diversity at 0.01195. Besides, intraspecific distances ranged from 0.0000 to 0.0058 and interspecific genetic distances ranged from 0.0000 to 0.0645. Furthermore, phylogenetic tree analysis using DNA barcoding results and morphological description data classified accessions into two groups corresponding to the Anthurium and Caladium species. In particular, HUIB_AA06 was distinct from the remaining accessions.