ISHS Acta Horticulturae 810: IX International Vaccinium Symposium
BLUEBERRY MICROSATELLITE MARKERS IDENTIFY CRANBERRY CULTIVARS |
| Authors: | N. Bassil, A. Oda, K.E. Hummer |
| Keywords: | Vaccinium macrocarpon, simple sequence repeat, SSR markers, expressed sequence tag (EST) |
| Abstract:
Throughout the more than 100 years of cranberry, Vaccinium macrocarpon Ait., cultivation, the confirmation of genotype identity through morphological means has had inherent difficulties. The cranberry growth habit, where seedlings can grow in the middle of a clonal colony and the practice of taking clippings from old fields to establish new ones can destroy trueness-to-type. Previously, we successfully identified blueberry (V. corymbosum L.) cultivars using microsatellite markers. Our objective for this study was to determine if these markers could be used for cranberry cultivar identification. Forty-six blueberry simple sequence repeat markers (SSR), i.e., microsatellites, were tested for the ability to amplify a polymorphic marker in American cranberry accessions. Sixteen SSR resulted in informative and polymorphic primer pairs and were used to fingerprint 16 economically important cranberry cultivars. They distinguished between the cultivars and grouped them based on pedigree. Two accessions labeled as V. macrocarpon ‘Searles’, collected from Jacob Searles Cranberry Co. in Wisconsin, had different genetic profiles. They were differentiated from each other based on the proportion of shared allele distance using these SSR, thus demonstrating the power of these markers in identifying genetically different cranberry plants that share the same cultivar name. A subset of these 16 blueberry SSR markers will be used to fingerprint the cranberry collection of the US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, National Clonal Germplasm Repository (NCGR), to evaluate genetic variation of important cultivars growing in Oregon and Washington fields and to provide web-access to these markers and fingerprints for the cranberry community. | |
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