Panax ginseng has long been widely used as a Chinese medicine. However, it takes 3 to 6 years to harvest a good quality root. This makes it very difficult to improve and establish new qualified strains. We have been trying to apply new biotechnology to solve this problem and established a novel mass-culture system from embryoids. 1-4) All Japanese ginseng strains are from foreign origins and only figures have been employed for selection to establish good quality strains. Further, the seeds must

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... be sowed soon after they are harvested since the seedling rate decreases during storage. These make it difficult and time-consuming to select and establish good qualified strains. Shoyama et al. 5) employed random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis 6) to show genetic homogeneity of regenerated plantlets from Panax notoginseng. Kohjyouma et al. 7) performed RAPD analysis of Atractylodes plants and found intraspecific variation with A. lancea. Kitanaka et al. 8) reported a RAPD marker which distinguishes interspecific hybrid ginseng from parental plants (Panax ginsengϫPanax quiquefolium). We obtained various Panax ginseng seeds from several cultivated areas, and also got a selected strain recently established as Aizu K-111 (now called Kaishusan). In the course of finding genetic markers to distinguish the strains, we tried RAPD PCR and found a primer which showed a 725 bp band common in the selected strain Aizu K-111, but not necessarily found in the other strains. We sequenced the amplified band and designed PCR primers which lead to better electrophoretic separation than the original primer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Plant Samples Subgroups of Panax ginseng were collected in cooperation with Nihon Ginseng Agric. Co-op. Assn. (Tokyo, Japan). Nagano local strain and its selected Mimaki strain were gifts from Nagano Agricultural Technique and Training Center (Nagano, Japan). Aizu local strain and its selected Aizu K-111 (now called Kaishusan, strain application No. 10590) were gifts from Aizu Branch, Fukushima Pref. Agricultural Experiment Station (Fukushima Pref., Japan). Panax ginseng is widely used as a Chinese medicine, but it takes a long time to reach harvest and to establish its qualified strains. In the course of searching high quality Panax ginseng, we found a useful random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primer, which showed a 725 base pair band for a selected elite strain Aizu K-111 (now called Kaishusan) including its cultured tissues, while the other strains did not necessarily show this band. We sequenced the DNA fragment amplified and designed primers to improve electrophoretic profiles, based on the sequence.