RESUMEN
Seventy isolates of Bacillus thuringiensis were isolated from soil samples collected from cotton fields. These isolates were characterized by randomly amplified poylmorphic DNA (RAPD) markers to determine their genetic diversity pattern based on their source of origin. Different random decamer primers were used for RAPD amplification, which generated a total of 1935 fragments; of these 1865 were polymorphic and 68 monomorphic. The primers OPA03, OPA08, OPD14, OPD19, OPD20, OPE17 and OPD19 produced 100% polymorphic fragments, whereas primers OPC06, OPC20 and OPD17 produced 20, 31 and 17 monomorphic fragments, respectively. When the RAPD banding pattern data was subjected to dendrogram construction, the 70 isolates fell into two separate clusters, cluster I and cluster II, which includes 26 and 44 B. thuringiensis isolates, respectively. These two main clusters were further divided into four subclusters at Eucledian distance of 150 and 80% similarity index. All primers showed amplification and indicated the good diversity of B. thuringiensis isolates. The RAPD pattern showed 4-10 bands per isolate, with MWt in the range of 0.4-3.5 Kb and an average of 193.5 fragments were produced per primer. The primer OPE17 was found to be the most discriminatory as it produced 286 polymorphic bands.
