Molecular and morphological characterization of local apple cultivars in Southern Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The number of local and traditional fruit cultivars in Andalusia (Southern Spain) has decreased dramatically since the 1970s when new commercial cultivars from breeding programs were introduced, replacing old varieties, and thus decreasing genetic diversity. The present study was included in a genetic resources project with the objective of identifying and preserving traditional fruit tree cultivars in Southern Spain. The goal of this study was to begin the characterization of 29 apple accessions (Malus x domestica Borkh) belonging to 13 traditional cultivar denominations. For molecular characterization studies, 12 simple sequence repeat markers previously developed for apple species were used. Morphological characterization was performed using 33 fruit traits. A total of 115 alleles were amplified for the 12 loci, ranging from 7 (CH01h01, CH01h10, and GD 12) to 13 alleles per locus (CH02c11). Forty-one alleles were unique to specific genotypes. The locus with the highest number of detected unique alleles was CH01f03b with 6 alleles. Expected heterozygosity

Molecular characterization of apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) genotypes originating from three complementary conservation strategies

“…It was shown that the number of alleles obtained by amplification with the 11th SSR primer was 1-3, with an average of 1.6. The set of microsatellite markers used showed a low level of polymorphism among the studied genotypes (Table 6), which is in agreement with similar studies (Guilford et al, 1997;Silfverberg-Dilworth et al, 2006), but it was lower than the amount reported in other studies for apple inbred lines and hybrids (Zhang et al, 2007;Gharghani et al, 2009;Farrokhi et al, 2011;Sikorskaite et al, 2012;Pérez-Romero et al, 2015;Ganopoulos et al, 2017). The lower value obtained in our study may be due to the use of agarose gel electrophoresis for the screening of SSR markers compared to polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis or automated analysis that would be able to resolve allelic variation at a finer scale than gel electrophoresis analysis.…”

“…Neighbor-joining tree based on Dice coefficient calculated by SSR markers of apple genotypes originating from three conservation strategies: field collection (ex situ), in vitro collection (v1, v2, v3), and cryocollection (c1, c2, c3). Bouhadida et al, 2011;Sikorskaite et al, 2012;Pérez-Romero et al, 2015;Ganopoulos et al, 2017).…”

Genetic Characterization of the Apple Germplasm Collection in Central Italy: The Value of Local Varieties

“…Many of these mapped SSR are linked to QTL with interesting agronomical, morphological, and organoleptic traits and could be used as molecular tools for marker assisted selection (MAS) in plant breeding programs ( Gianfranceschi et al, 1998 ; Gygax et al, 2004 ; Kunihisa et al, 2014 ; Sun et al, 2014 ; Liu et al, 2016 ). Microsatellites have been also widely used in apples to asses the genetic diversity in core collections ( Yun et al, 2015 ; Lassois et al, 2016 ; Urrestarazu et al, 2016 ), cultivar characterization ( Goulão and Oliveira, 2001 ; Patzak et al, 2012 ; Pérez-Romero et al, 2015 ), and parentage analysis ( Kitahara et al, 2005 ; Moriya et al, 2011 ; Lassois et al, 2016 ).…”

Molecular, Physico-Chemical, and Sensory Characterization of the Traditional Spanish Apple Variety “Pero de Cehegín”

“…The profile of "Pero de Cehegín", did not show correspondence with profiles of diploid accessions named "Pero" in other Iberian collections conserved at different institutions. No correspondence was found with "Pero Rufino", "Pero Rosa", and other "Pero" accessions from local and traditional apples located in Andalucía [19], "Peruco Lardero" from the germplasm bank at the University of Lleida [48] and its synonym "Pero Mingan" at Aula Dei-CSIC [36], "Pero de Coura", and other "Pero" from three Portuguese germplasm banks [49]. Additionally, correspondence was neither found with other triploid accessions such as "Pero Pardo", "Pera de Sangüesa" (syn.…”

“…The molecular characterization of apple collections has been performed in the past using Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR). A high number of microsatellites have been described and used to identify different varieties [17][18][19][20] and to assess the genetic diversity in core collections [21][22][23][24]. In particular, there are several studies in Spanish germplasm collections [23] but to our knowledge, the "Pero de Cehegín" has not been included yet.…”