Lahat Regency, South Sumatra, Indonesia, is home to diverse Durio populations, including the durian Kebau, which has received acclaim as a superior local cultivar. However, molecular data on this cultivar remain limited. This study aimed to assess the genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships of durian Kebau compared with other Indonesian durian cultivars using the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region analysis. The analyzed ITS sequences totaled 13, comprising newly generated sequences from Kebau and sequences retrieved from the NCBI database, including accessions of Durio zibethinus and Durio sp. Kura-Kura from West Kalimantan. Conducting multiple sequence alignment used ClustalW, with genetic diversity parameters calculated using DnaSP. A haplotype network construction resulted in using PopART, while phylogenetic relationships inferred utilized the maximum likelihood (ML) and neighbor-joining (NJ) methods implemented in MEGA X with 1,000 bootstrap replicates. The analysis revealed high genetic diversity, with pairwise distances ranging from 0.000 to 0.227, yielding 11 distinct haplotypes and 49 parsimony-informative sites. Phylogenetic trees showed the durian Kebau exhibited a close genetic relationship with the D. zibethinus cultivar Monthong and clustered with durians from West Kalimantan. These findings highlight the genetic richness of local durian germplasm and provide data for breeding programs and genetic resource conservation.
Durian germplasm, internal transcribed spacer (ITS), genetic diversity, genetic relationship, quantitative traits
The study revealed the highest genetic diversity in Indonesian durian germplasm. The research also established that durian Kebau a showed considerable genetic relationship with Durio zibethinus and durian Kura-Kura.