摘要：Order Dioscoreales belongs to Monocotyledons, but with many more characters such as reticulate venation pattern, nervation between primaries, twinning habit, ring vascular bundles, compounding of leaf, trimerous flowers, rhuminate endosperm, and lateral cotyledon, which shows affinities of Dioscoreales to Dicotyledons. The genus Dioscorea , which belongs to the family Dioscoreaceae is widely distributed in MTR, Maharashtra, India and represents five species namely D. bulbifera, D. oppositifolia, D. hispida, D. pentaphylla , and D. belophylla . A total of 122 decamer random primers were scrolled for RAPD profile and 61 out of them gave amplification in all five Dioscorea species. The UPGMA created dendrogram on the basis of RAPD showed two clusters. The cluster I included two subclusters - subcluster I ( D. bulbifera and D. oppositifolia ) and subcluster II ( D. hispida and D. pentaphylla ). D. belophylla was completely outgrouped from rest of the species and was grouped under cluster II. However, ITS sequence data reveal that five species of Dioscorea were placed in two major clusters
