Genetic diversity analysis with ISSR PCR on green algae Chlorella vulgaris and Chlorella pyrenoidosa

In the present study, genetic polymorphism and diversity in unicellular clones of Chlorella vulgaris Beijerinck and Chlorella pyrenoidosa Chick were studied with Inter Simple Sequence Repeats PCR (ISSR PCR). Samples including four clones of C. vulgaris and three clones of C. pyrenoidosa were purified by single-clone-choice method. For four C. vulgaris unicellular clones, the total number of the bands scored for 18 primers was 298; and the number of the polymorphic bands was 118, of which 39.6% were polymorphic. The size of PCR products ranged from 200 to 2 500 bp. The total number of bands scored for 18 primers, the number of polymorphic bands and the percentage of three C. pyrenoidosa unicellular clones was 194.83 and 30.8%, respectively. POPGENE analysis show that the average Nei genetic diversity (h*) and Shannon index of diversity (I*) in the four C. vulgaris unicellular clones was 0.2181 and 0.3208, respectively, which is slightly higher than those of the three C. pyrenoidosa unicellular clones (0.190 3 and 0.274 8), which agreed with the percentage of polymorphic bands in the mixed samples of the two species. The results suggest that ISSR is a useful method to Chlorella for intraspecies genetic analysis.