Medicinal plants are major sources of secondary metabolites for which they
have been paid more attention by pharmaceutical industries. In order to produce these
secondary metabolites, medicinal plants are cultivated and for that plant tissue or
organ, culture can be a suitable alternative. However, these plants are treated with plant
hormones and elicitors to enhance the secondary metabolites and such elicitation may
lead to genetic or epigenetic changes which are known as somaclonal variations. Thus,
a stringent method of monitoring is required to observe the true-to-types of these
medicinal plants when multiplied through tissue culture. Molecular markers like
Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD), Inter-Simple Sequence Repeat
(ISSR), and Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) are highly suitable markers to assess
clonal fidelity in micropropagated medicinal plants. In the present chapter, the
execution of such markers to check somaclonal variations in tissue culture raised
medicinal plants is discussed in detail.
Keywords: Clonal fidelity, ISSR, Medicinal plants, Micropropagation, Molecular
markers, Organ culture, Plant tissue, RAPD, SSR, Simple sequence repeats,
Somaclonal variations, Tissue culture, True-to-type plants.
