Conservation of bamboos for future exploitation as fuel, fibre and as an ingredient for cosmetics depends on knowledge of its natural genetic variation. The study of molecular genetic diversity in bamboos will provide important information for its conservation. This article reports on the genetic diversity in 25 species representing five genera of bamboos found in Indonesia using Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) molecular markers. Out of 40 primers, 24 primers produced 1107 total bands and 86.21% of polymorphic bands across the 25 species. Sixteen bands were uniquely found in one species only and their presence or absence helped to define nine bamboo species. RAPD band sizes ranged from 162 to 2247 base pairs. A dendrogram based on the similarity coefficient of Dice divided the bamboo species into three big clusters. In conclusion, RAPD can capture the diversity among five different bamboo genera and has a great potential to be used in the study of genetic diversity in Indonesian bamboos.

Bamboos are versatile plants with many usages. Indonesia has a high diversity of Bamboos species and has been using them for a long time. As multipurpose plants, they are vulnerable to over exploration. Much of the bamboo land has been converted into housing or agricultural land. Development and conservation need to be balanced, to protect the genetic diversity, bamboo in particular. We studied the relationship among four genera of bamboo that mostly found in Indonesia using gene that presents in chloroplast DNA, ndhH. DNA from twenty-four samples from Bambusa, Dendrocalamus, Gigantochloa and Schizostachyum were extracted and amplified using specific ndhH primer. Sequencing results were analysed with BioEdit 7.2 software. Phylogenetic tree was build using raxmlGUI 2.0 software. The result showed that ndhH gene generated good sequence quality. It has small variation among samples. The result suggested that ndhH was able to differentiate some species within Schizostachyum, however; it was not a success for others.