Vol. 82 No: 2

Title:
Morphology and microsatellites in Spanish apple collections

Authors:
A.M. RAMOS-CABRER, M.B. DÍAZ-HERNÁNDEZ and S. PEREIRA-LORENZO

pp: 257-265

Abstract:
The population of apple, Malus pumila Mill., indigenous to northwest Spain shows a wide range of ripening periods and fruit quality and is an unexploited resource for breeding programmes. The main purpose of this study was to fingerprint these accessions and to construct a molecular database including the cultivars commonly grown in Spain. A total of 77 indigenous and 26 international accessions were analysed using ten microsatellite [simple sequence repeat (SSR)] markers. Some of the main morphological and agronomic characteristics, such as fruit weight, colour, shape, sweetness in °Brix, flavour type according to content of malic and tannic acids, and harvest time were recorded. The 77 Spanish cultivars showed a unique fingerprint.We propose to preserve these 77 genetically different cultivars in our Germplasm Bank, and recommend that 31 of them should be considered for a core collection to maintain all the diversity recorded. Some 29% of the cultivars showed three alleles at several loci and were confirmed, cytometrically, as triploids. These tended to produce larger fruit (15% by weight) than diploids. The use of ten polymorphic microsatellite markers provided a useful technique for fingerprinting apple cultivars in the Spanish germplasm resource and for indicating triploids. The fingerprints indicated that the famous triploid Dutch cultivar ´Belle de Boskoop` may be derived from an unreduced gamete of ´Reinette de Caux`.

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