MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF DOUM PALM (HYPHAENE COMPRESSA) FROM SELECTED REGIONS OF KENYA USING CHLOROPLAST SIMPLE SEQUENCE REPEATS (cpSSR) MARKERS

Doum palm (Hyphaene compressa) is an enduring member of the Arecaceae family of plants, an essential multipurpose plant with exceptional features that serve as a socioeconomic resource for people in the East Africa region. The unavailability of genetic and genomic data leads to difficulties enhancing such a crop, thereby preventing the actualization of its agronomic and breeding potential, hence the need for characterization. This study included 64 genotypes of doum palm collected from four locations in Kenya and ten polymorphic chloroplast microsatellite markers. Locus Among the ten polymorphic cpSSRs studied, the OPCG13 locus exhibited the highest observed and expected heterozygosity. Across all loci, we detected the mean value of 10.145 for the gene flow parameter. The mean number of significant allele frequencies for the 79 alleles detected was 0.75, with a range of 0.531 to 0.89. The median was 0.0036, 0.341, and 0.275 for observed heterozygosity, predicted heterozygosity, and PIC, respectively. All 64 genotypes were sorted into three main categories using neighbor-joining clustering and STRUCTURE analysis. At the population level, PCoA analysis explained 51.66 percent of the variation. As a result of these findings, cpSSR markers were used for the first time to characterize selected doum palm germplasm, which signifies that such a marker helps study doum palms at the molecular level. Our findings indicate that doum palm species in Kenya have a reasonable genetic variation coupled with considerable heterozygosity; consequently, these doum palm genetic variations are essential for the genetic improvement, breeding, and conservation initiatives of doum palm genotypes in Kenya.