M13-based genotyping of marine cyanobacterial strains from the Indian subcontinent and maintained in the NFMC germplasm collection

The aim of this study was to analyze marine cyanobacterial culture collections strains of the Indian subcontinent at the level below species. This is important to improve the abilities of service culture collections to provide their user community with correctly identified and clean organisms. A total of 50 marine cyanobacterial strains were genotyped with M13 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) fingerprinting to provide diagnostic fingerprints for each culture. Depending on the strains, 9 to 26 bands were observed for the primer tested. Within the species, strains representing different isolates were genetically clearly different. Data obtained from genomic fingerprinting were used to construct binary distance matrix, and the neighbor-joining tree constructed demonstrated the ability of this method to differentiate strains at the intraspecific level. An important and useful result obtained in this study is the application of the M13 PCR fingerprinting method on almost all forms of cyanobacteria for strain and species discrimination.