ISHS Acta Horticulturae 701: XII International Symposium on Apricot Culture and Decline
MOLECULAR MARKERS FOR VARIABILITY ASSESSMENT AND MAP COMPARISON IN PRUNUS |
| Author: | P. Arus |
| Keywords: | Cultivar identification, fruit breeding, functional map, Rosaceae, RFLPs, microsatellites |
| Abstract:
Variability analysis and cultivar identification have been performed with various molecular markers types in the main crops of the genus Prunus: apricot, almond, cherry, peach and plum. These results have been very useful to establish the level and distribution of the genetic variation in this group of species. Due to their high polymorphism and quality, microsatellites appear as the best markers available for cultivar identification. This is particularly true in peach, where the high economical value of the new cultivars and the low level of variability of the species determine that an effective fingerprinting method is urgently needed. The microsatellite markers already developed in peach are valuable tools that can also be used for cultivar identification in other Prunus species given that approximately half of them produce amplified fragments that are polymorphic in other species. A functional map with a high average density (1.3 cM/marker) of transportable markers (RFLPs and SSRs), most of them corresponding to known DNA sequences, is available as a powerful resource for Prunus genetic analysis. Map comparisons using this map as a reference have allowed to establish that the genome of different Prunus crops is essentially collinear. Apple-Prunus comparisons detect also a high level of synteny, suggesting that, as it occurs in other plant families, the Rosaceae genome has a considerable degree of conservation. Comparisons between Prunus and Arabidopsis maps have also allowed to recognize conservation between various genomic regions of these two distant taxons. In all, these results indicate that the information on gene position and sequence can be transferred from one species to the rest, and suggest that Prunus can be a good model for Rosaceae genome analysis. | |
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