Rosewood (Aniba rosaeodora Ducke) is one of the economically valuable species in the Amazon region, because it is the principal source of linalool which is demanded by the perfumery industry. This species was submitted to hard exploitation along the past decades and besides this almost nothing is known about its intraspecific genetic diversity. The objectives of this work were: 1) to validate a method to collect rosewood leaves, while preserving the integrity of DNA until storage in freezer; 2) to choose a method for extraction of nucleic acids in quantity and with quality good enough to be used for RAPD and 3) to develop criteria for evaluating the reproducibility, which could help to select RAPD bands useful for genetic diversity analysis. Immediately following collection, the leaves were put in PET flasks partially filled with silica gel and kept there up to 10 days. Three methods for extracting nucleic acids from those leaves, the PCR conditions and the reproducibility of the RAPD patterns produced were tested. Criteria for elimination of bands that contributed to maintain reproducibility away from the ideal, which would be total reproducibility, were developed and the differences produced by application of these criteria were statically tested. DNA with sufficient quality to generate RAPD patterns under the improved conditions defined for the PCRs was obtained. Elimination of bands with reproducibility below 70% did not differ from control. Elimination of bands with reproducibility below 90% differed from all the other treatments tested (P < 5%).
RAPD; reproducibility; molecular markers; Amazon