XVI International Botanical Congess

Paeonia sect. Moutan is an important plant of great ornamental and medicinal value. This section is a long lived subshrub and its wild types are endemic to China. Scientists have made different taxonomic treatments of this section based on morphological characters. Some divided it into seven species and described P.quii as a new species, while others did not agree with this opinion and described some other new species. We used some cpDNA and nrDNA fragments as probes for running PCR-RFLP. The restriction sites analysis shows that P.rockii, P. ostii and P. quii could not be separated. Then we used 14 RAPD primers and obtained 120 polymorphic loci. The dendrogram of RAPD shows that the seven species are discrete, each forming an independent cluster. The average genetic distance is 0.4-0.6 between the species, and the genetic distance is 0.36-0.58 between P. quii and the other species. According to our data, therefore, P.quii is a good species. SSR analysis based on hybridization by using (GACA)4 shows results similar to that of RAPD. It is concluded that RAPD and SSR are good molecular markers for distinguishing allied species.