Aquilaria Malaccensis Case Study
Abstract
Aquilaria malaccensis is an agarwood tree that originate from a place called Malacca. Among other aquilaria species, aquilaria malaccenis has the best quality of the fragrant resin. Therefore, due this unidue characteristic, A.malaccesis has been listed in IUCN as an endangered tree. In this study, the aim was to record the morphology of the A.malaccensis and examine the genetic variation among the A.malaccensis. This is because although they are the same species, but some tree had shown variation from the leaves, bark and also wood. Some tree has leaves that small in size while other bigger. The bark colour also appear to be different from white, yellow or the bark might be dark brown along with ‘katak puru’ design. With the observation …show more content…
The bark is usually dark to pale grey, smooth, entire, becoming finely and irregularly fissured, meanwhile the inner bark is usually cream-white, soft, striping in long pieces and glabrous. Besides, the wood is light, soft, and usually shows no distinction in color between sapwood and heartwood (Chakrabarty et al. 1994).
Aquilaria malaccensis is the major producer of agarwood in Malaysia. Agarwood emits a wonderful fragrant when the wood containing this resin is burnt. Because of this unique property, agarwood is used as an ingredient in manufacturing perfumes and incenses. Agarwood has been used in traditional medicines over many generations, and recently has been included in pharmaceutical products to treat many illnesses including coughs, acroparalysis, asthma and as an anti-histamine (Kim et al. 1997; Bhuiyan et al. 2009).
Agarwood formation takes place in the stem or main branches of the tree where an injury has occurred. It is believed that the tree is first attacked by a pathogenic fungus, which causes it to weaken. Other factors such as tree age, genetic background, seasonal and environmental variation, may be important in agarwood formation (Ng et al. …show more content…
As such, they are also known as simple sequence repeats (SSR), variable number tandem repeats (VNTR) and short tandem repeats (STR). As a result of the widespread use of microsatellites, our understanding of their mutational behaviour, function, evolution and distribution in the genome and across taxa is increasing rapidly (Li et al. 2002; Ellegren 2004). A microsatellite locus typically varies in length between 5 and 40 repeats, but longer strings of repeats are possible. Dinucleotide, trinucleotide and tetranucleotide repeats are the most common choices for molecular genetic studies. Dinucleotide repeats account for the majority of microsatellites for many species (Li et al. 2002). Many microsatellites have high-mutation rates (between 10−2 and 10−6 mutations per locus per generation, and on average 5 × 10−4) that generate the high levels of allelic diversity necessary for genetic studies of processes acting on ecological time scales (Schlötterer
Aquilaria malaccensis is an agarwood tree that originate from a place called Malacca. Among other aquilaria species, aquilaria malaccenis has the best quality of the fragrant resin. Therefore, due this unidue characteristic, A.malaccesis has been listed in IUCN as an endangered tree. In this study, the aim was to record the morphology of the A.malaccensis and examine the genetic variation among the A.malaccensis. This is because although they are the same species, but some tree had shown variation from the leaves, bark and also wood. Some tree has leaves that small in size while other bigger. The bark colour also appear to be different from white, yellow or the bark might be dark brown along with ‘katak puru’ design. With the observation …show more content…
The bark is usually dark to pale grey, smooth, entire, becoming finely and irregularly fissured, meanwhile the inner bark is usually cream-white, soft, striping in long pieces and glabrous. Besides, the wood is light, soft, and usually shows no distinction in color between sapwood and heartwood (Chakrabarty et al. 1994).
Aquilaria malaccensis is the major producer of agarwood in Malaysia. Agarwood emits a wonderful fragrant when the wood containing this resin is burnt. Because of this unique property, agarwood is used as an ingredient in manufacturing perfumes and incenses. Agarwood has been used in traditional medicines over many generations, and recently has been included in pharmaceutical products to treat many illnesses including coughs, acroparalysis, asthma and as an anti-histamine (Kim et al. 1997; Bhuiyan et al. 2009).
Agarwood formation takes place in the stem or main branches of the tree where an injury has occurred. It is believed that the tree is first attacked by a pathogenic fungus, which causes it to weaken. Other factors such as tree age, genetic background, seasonal and environmental variation, may be important in agarwood formation (Ng et al. …show more content…
As such, they are also known as simple sequence repeats (SSR), variable number tandem repeats (VNTR) and short tandem repeats (STR). As a result of the widespread use of microsatellites, our understanding of their mutational behaviour, function, evolution and distribution in the genome and across taxa is increasing rapidly (Li et al. 2002; Ellegren 2004). A microsatellite locus typically varies in length between 5 and 40 repeats, but longer strings of repeats are possible. Dinucleotide, trinucleotide and tetranucleotide repeats are the most common choices for molecular genetic studies. Dinucleotide repeats account for the majority of microsatellites for many species (Li et al. 2002). Many microsatellites have high-mutation rates (between 10−2 and 10−6 mutations per locus per generation, and on average 5 × 10−4) that generate the high levels of allelic diversity necessary for genetic studies of processes acting on ecological time scales (Schlötterer