Apricot

Cultivar description

Cultivar detection

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Among all available markers, nuclear simple sequence repeats (SSRs or microsatellites) are a widely used class of genetic markers for population studies and genetic diversity assessment (Fossati et al. 2003). The abundance of microsatellites in many plant species, codominant Mendelian inheritance, high level of polymorphism, and easy detection by PCR and electrophoretic methods have made them the genetic markers of choice (Powell et al. 1996; Morgante and Olivieri 1993).

Homologous microsatellites were recently made available from genomic DNA and appeared more polymorphic, when tested on European accessions (Lopes et al. 2002; Hagen et al. 2004; Messina 2004).

Cultivar identity and phylogenetic origin in apricot was confirmed using AFLPs (Hagen et al. 2002, Geuna et al. 2003) or peach microsatellites primers (Hormaza 2002; Romero et al. 2003; Zhebentyayeva et al. 2003), until SSRs were isolated from apricots (Lopes et al. 2002; Messina 2004).

In our study, 10 different primer combinations Table), originally developed for apricot SSR loci and representing different regions of the apricot genome, were used for amplification of DNA from different apricot cultivars.