Open Collections

Abstract

The genus Lavandula comprises of several economically important lavender species that are mainly cultivated worldwide for essential oil production. Identification of lavender species and their cultivars has been a huge bottleneck in lavender industries due to lack of appropriate identification mechanisms. Recent advances in modern technologies would help to address these identification issues through development of potential molecular markers, including simple sequence repeats (SSRs). SSRs can be developed from specific species, and can be potentially used for related species, which lack the source sequences to develop species-specific SSRs. Here, we describe the guidelines and steps of identifying and analyzing SSRs from expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences of lavender species. We also detail the validation procedures of selected EST-SSRs in distinguishing source (donor) species as well as related species.