Abstract In this study, 40000 tissue culture-derived banana plants (vitroplants) at different growth
stages, i.e. acclimatization, nursery and open field of banana (Musa spp.) cultivar ‘Grand Naine’
were screened for somaclonal variations using morphological investigations and molecular characterization.
The total detected variants were grouped into 25 off-types (two of them died) in addition
to the normal plant. Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD) was carried out to study the
differences among the normal cultivar ‘Grand Naine’ and its 23 variants using 17 arbitrary primers.
Cluster analysis results revealed that ‘winged petiole’ and ‘deformed lamina’ were more related to
the normal plant. However, ‘Giant plant’ and ‘weak plant’ related to each other and clustered with
normal plant. According to principal coordinate analysis, most of the variants were aggregated
nearly, whereas ‘variegated plant’ was separated apart from the other variants. This may reflect
the genetic difference between ‘variegated plant’ and the other variants. The results obtained from
both molecular and morphological analyses were in contiguous with better resolution when using