Acacia mangium: a tropical forest tree of the coastal lowlands with low genetic diversity.

Abstract

Allozyme genotypes were determined in germinating open-pollinated seed collected from 5-30 trees in each of 11 populations in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Queensland. Each seedling was assayed for 18 enzyme systems and scored for electrophoretic variants at 30 loci. Eleven loci were monomorphic and the frequency of the common allele was less than 90% at only 5 loci. With the exception of one locus in 3 populations, the common allele at each locus was the same in every population. At 13 loci, the rare alleles were present in only one or two populations. Observed and expected heterozygosities were similar for all populations, with very low means of 0.015 and 0.017, respectively. A study of genetic diversity in 8 other species of Acacia showed that it is A. mangium rather than the genus that is genetically depauperate.