Genetic Diversity on Amaranthus hybridus   L., Amaranthus viridis   L. and Amaranthus spinosus   L. in parts of Rivers State, Nigeria

The Amaranth plants are annuals or short-lived perennials with over 103 species of flowering plants in the family Amaranthaceae, distributed nearly worldwide. Several amaranth species are useful as food crops and are grown both for their leaves and for their edible seeds, which are a nutritious pseudocereal (nongrass seeds used like cereal grains). This paper reports the genetic diversity of three species of Amaranthus (A. hybridus L., A. viridis L. and A. spinosus L.) in Rivers state of Nigeria. Result obtained from this research showed high rate of diversity. DNA characterization and sequencing of the species were done through plastid Ribulose-1,5biophosphate Carboxylase large chain (rbcL) genetic marker to determine the rate of genetic variation among members of this genus in our study area. The sequence figures were firstly compared on Basic Local Alignment Sequence Tool for validation. Phylogenetic and molecular evolutional analysis was conducted using MEGA version 7. The dendogram of the molecular phylogeny generated from MEGA 7 software shows elevated rate of variation among studied species.