Abstract
An effective and rapid method for propagating genetically true plantlets of a pharmaceutically important plant Bacopa monnieri L. was developed from thidiazuron (TDZ) pulse treated nodal segment explants. Explants treated for 24 h with different concentration of 0.0, 5.0, 10, 20 or 40 AM thidiazuron (TDZ) prepared In liquid Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium induces multiple shoot on MS basal medium without growth regulators. The highest frequency 95.3 +/- 2.3% of regeneration and maximum number 43.7 +/- 2.0 of shoots per explants with an average shoot height of 5.4 +/- 0.29 cm were achieved after 08 weeks of culture from the explants treated with 20 pm TDZ. Simultaneously, the regenerated microshoots were rooted on the same growth regulator free media. Elongated shoots with roots were successfully acclimated to ex vitro condition with a 97% survival rate. Genomic stability of in vitro developed plants of B. monnieri was first time determined using flow cytometry and single primer amplification reaction (SPAR) methods viz., random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), inter simple sequence repeat polymorphic DNA (ISSR) and directed amplification of minisatellite DNA (DAMD) and compared with donor plant. Nuclear DNA (nDNA) content of in vitro propagated B. monnieri plants has been estimated as 2.08 pg/2C based on the flow cytometric investigation of nuclei isolated from leaf tissues. No significant variations in nDNA content, plant genome size and ploidy level were observed between micro propagated plants and field grown donor plants. Likewise, the SPAR markers also revealed monomorphic banding profiles in micropropagated plantlets of B. monnieri and similar with to that of the donor plants verifying their genomic stability.