Patterns of Exchange of Multiplying Onion (Allium cepa L. Aggregatum-Group) in Fennoscandian Home Gardens

Abstract

Multiplying onion (Allium cepa L. Aggregatum-Group), commonly known as shallot or potato onion, has a long tradition of cultivation in Fennoscandian home gardens. During the last decades, more than 80 accessions, maintained as vegetatively propagated clones, have been gathered from home gardens in all Fennoscandian countries. A genetic analysis showed regional patterns of accessions belonging to the same genetic group. However, accessions belonging to the same genetic group could originate in any of the countries. These results suggested both short- and long-distance exchange of set onions, which was confirmed by several survey responses. Some of the most common genetic groups also resembled different modern varieties. The morphological characterization illustrated that most characters were strongly influenced by environment and set onion properties. The only reliably scorable trait was bulb skin color. Neither our morphological nor genetic results support a division between potato onions and shallots. Instead, naming seems to follow linguistic traditions. An ethnobotanical survey tells of the Fennoscandian multiplying onions as being a crop with reliable harvest, excellent storage ability, and good taste. An increased cultivation of this material on both household and commercial scale should be possible.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s12231-018-9426-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Growth, Yield and Resistance Responses of Three Cultivars on True Seed Shallots to Twisted Disease with Salicylic Acid Application

“…Disease incidence is more influenced by the genetic structure of plant cultivar than the addition of exogenous salicylic acid. This is in line with the statement of Leino et al (2018) that each cultivar is affected by different genetic traits. Salicylic acid can support the plant resistance by reducing the percentage of disease incidence, but there does not appear any relation to the plant growth rate, accumulation of total dry weight and fresh weight of bulbs.…”

Shallot Species and Subtypes Discrimination Based on Morphology Descriptors

“…A high variability is present among shallot landraces from one group/genotype and obvious differences in phenotypes can be observed despite the landraces’ high kinship [ 14 ]. Rungis et al [ 15 ] report on the genetic characterization of 264 potato onion accessions from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech, and Croatia gene bank collections.…”

“…This study continues our earlier work and findings aiming to simplify the determination process of shallot landraces and the complexity of their diversity. Multivariate analyses were used to differentiate onion cultivars [ 11 , 24 , 25 ], garlic cultivars [ 26 ], and shallot accessions [ 14 , 27 , 28 ]. Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression is a type of a supervised multivariate analysis that forms new components that explain most of the variance of the independent variables and is useful for predicting dependent variables reducing the dimensionality of the dataset [ 29 ].…”

“…As already mentioned above, the phenotype diversity of shallot’s local landraces places difficulties in shallot species determination. Unclear differences between shallot species or subtypes are mainly a result of either inconsistent plant material or a too restricted list of morphological descriptors [ 14 ]. This research aims to determine if discrimination between shallots species could be achieved using vegetative and bulb morphology, primarily ECP/GR descriptors.…”

Yield and Storage Performance of Onion (Allium cepa L.) Genotypes under in situ and ex-situ Conditions

“…An ethnobotanical survey tells of the Fennoscandian multiplying onions as being a crop with reliable harvest, excellent storage ability, and good taste. Increased cultivation of this material on both household and commercial-scale should be possible [11,12].…”