Leaves and essential oils for therapeutic purposes are important traits in lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus). In this study, the genetic diversity of ten C. citratus accessions collected around Nigeria was investigated using simple sequence repeat (SSR) and inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers. Also, we determined the chemical content of C. citratus essential oil. In this study, the essential oil was extracted using hydro-distillation and the constituents of the oil were determined with gas chromatography-mass spectrophotometry (GC-MS). The markers produced a total of 47 alleles with a mean PIC value of 0.73 in the accessions. The cluster analysis grouped the accessions into two major groups showing genetic relatedness between the accessions: LG07, LG03 and LG01 are the closest members, while LG08 is very distant from the other accessions. In addition, the factorial analysis categorized the ten accessions into four quadrants, which have some similarities to the dendrogram grouping. GC-MS analysis resulted in the identification of 18 compounds. Essential oils of LG02 and LG03 had a citral content of 49.38 % and 66.47 %, respectively. These results revealed the genetic diversity among the accessions evaluated that can be used to maximize the use of genetic resources of C. citratus varieties.
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63-72
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