Genetic relationships among Prunus rootstocks for sweet cherry Prunus avium L cultivars
Turkoglu, Z.; Koc, A.; Ercisli, S.; Bilgener, S.; Akbulut, M.; Yildirim, N.; Gercekcioglu, R.; Esitken, A.; Gunes, M.
Plant Genetic Resources 10(02): 101-107
2012
ISSN/ISBN: 1479-2621 DOI: 10.1017/s147926211200007x
Accession: 036500151
Sweet cherries can be grafted on a wide range of rootstocks belonging to Prunus avium, Prunus cerasus, Prunus mahaleb, Prunus angustifolia or hybrids of different Prunus species. Identification of Prunus rootstocks using morphological traits is almost impossible particularly during the dormant season. However, molecular analysis carried out on actively growing shoot tips, leaves or dormant buds provides good opportunity to reliably distinguish rootstocks. In this study, DNA was extracted from the leaves of a total of 184 sweet cherry rootstock candidates belonging to P. avium L., P. cerasus L., P. mahaleb L. and P. angustifolia L. previously selected from the north-western part of Turkey. The rootstock candidates were tested with ten simple sequence repeat (SSR) primers, developed for the Prunus genus. The primers successfully identified all rootstock candidates. The results showed that the number of alleles per locus ranged from 1 (UDAp-41, UCD-CH21 and CPSCT1) to 2 (UCD-CH31) with an average of 13.3 alleles per locus, indicating that the SSRs were highly informative. Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic mean analysis demonstrated that P. avium accessions are closely related to P. cerasus. The reference rootstocks were clustered with their associated botanical species.