Abstract:Porphyra haitanensis is an important economic marine crop, and has been widely cultivated along the coasts of South China. The correct identification of species or forma of Porphyra is necessary for ensuring the wellbred cultivation and the quality of production. However, as the gametophytic blade of Porphyra is morphologically simple and marked variations occur as environmental conditions change, it is very difficult to identify the species or forma of Porphyra based only on their morphological characteristics. In order to find a new way to discriminate the forma of P. haitanensis, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of nuclear ribosomal DNA (including 5.8S rDNA) of 10 germplasm materials of wildtype P. haitanensis were amplified and sequence analyzed by NCBI blast. The sequence length of the amplified fragments that ranged from 1 208 bp to 1 219 bp, can be divided into ITS1, 5.8S and ITS2 three regions. The 5.8S rDNA region of the 10 materials was of an identical size, 160 bp. The ITS1 and ITS2 regions varied slightly by two or three bps. By multiple sequences alignment, the result showed that the sequences of ITS region (including ITS1 and ITS2) of the 10 materials are different from each other and identical sequence pair was not found among these strains, sequence homology was 95.82%-99.73%, so it is easy to discriminate 10 germplasm materials of P. haitanensis by comparing the sequences of their ITS regions. And the sequences of 5.8S region of the 10 materials are identical, but difference with other Porphyra species, sequences homology was 79.7%-95.0%, so the sequences of 5.8S rDNA can be used to discriminate the species of Porphyra. In other words, the sequence of 5.8S rDNA-ITS region of P. haitanensis was alternate array by conservative region and high variational region, and the mode of sequence array of 5.8S rDNAITS regions can be a powerful tool in variety identification of P. haitanensis. The phylogenetic analyses based on these data also support the results.