Phytochemical, Antioxidant Activity and Determination of Genetic Diversity in Artocarpus Heterophyllus Using RAPD Molecular Markers

The present investigation was aimed at analysing the phytochemical and antioxidant activity of leaves of 5 different Jackfruit sp. And Molecular characterization using 2 arbitary primers with the help of RAPD technique, in order to understand the diversity among the various Jackfruit sp. The antioxidant property was evaluated using the radical scavenging assay. In the present study 4 different solvents were used for extraction of phytochemicals from leaf samples. Important phytochemicals such as alkaloids, carbohydrates and cardiac glycosides were determined in the leaf extracts using all the solvents. Acetone extract of the Jackfruit leaves exhibited good antimicrobial activity against the selected human pathogens i. e. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus. The selected primers generate distinctive products. A total of 57 fragments were produced from the two RAPD primers used. The maximum number of fragment bands were produced by the OP A8 primer (GTGACGTAGG) was (32) bands which showed 21.87 % polymorphism and 6.25 % monomorphism and by the OP A9 primer (GGGTAACGCC) was (25) bands which showed 24 % polymorphism and 3.84 % monomorphism which indicates high diversity among the selected leaf samples. Polymorphism detected by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) has proved to be useful for identifying variation at different levels in the plants.