Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) is a domesticated cultivar belonging to the family Zingiberaceae and is widely used as spice, medicine and cosmetics. In the cur-rent paper, the genetic structure of nineteen commercial cultivars of turmeric of northeast (NE) India was assessed by molecular markers and their genome size. The average polymorphism, polymorphic information content, marker index were found to be 98.14%, 0.34, 33.66, and 86.48%, 0.22, 19.57, for RAPD- and ISSR-based markers, respec-tively. Based on RAPD and ISSR markers, at the inter-population level, effective number of alleles, Nei’s gene diversity and Shannon’s information index values were 1.46, 0.28, 0.44 and 1.50, 0.28, 0.41, respectively. As inferred using flow cytometry, the genome size varied between 2.59 ± 0.03 pg (cultivar of Assam) to 2.95 ± 0.04 pg (cultivar of Meghalaya) with a 1.14-fold variation. Terminal positioning of higher genome size containing turmeric cultivars on the dendrogram represents geographical isolation leading to evolutionary younger origin.

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