Development of Modified Cocoa DNA Extraction Method.

Abstract

This is the first attempt to study Papua New Guinea cocoa at the genetic level using molecular markers. To study cocoa at the molecular level, the first the step is to extract clean good quality Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) to be used for DNA profiling. This paper described a modified method developed to extract good quality DNA, after attempts to use the conventional Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) based methods failed. The modified procedure developed was successful and used to extract high quality DNA and used to evaluate the genetic diversity of selected hybrid cocoa planting materials from Papua New Guinea.