Genetic Diversity and Phylogenetic Relationships among Plum Germplasm Resources in China Assessed with Inter-simple Sequence Repeat Markers

Abstract

<jats:p>Inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers were used to evaluate genetic similarity and interrelationship among 104 plum (<jats:italic>Prunus</jats:italic> L. spp.) and related accessions from the Chinese National Germplasm Repository for Plums and Apricots and the Tianshan Germplasm Repository for Wild Fruit Resources, including six plum species (<jats:italic>Prunus salicina</jats:italic> Lindl., <jats:italic>Prunus simonii</jats:italic> Carr., <jats:italic>Prunus ussuriensis</jats:italic> Kov. et Kost., <jats:italic>Prunus domestica</jats:italic> L., <jats:italic>Prunus cerasifera</jats:italic> Ehrh., and <jats:italic>Prunus spinosa</jats:italic> L.), two related species [apricot (<jats:italic>Prunus armeniaca</jats:italic> L.) and nanking cherry (<jats:italic>Prunus tomentosa</jats:italic> Thunb.)], eight putative hybrids between plum and apricot (plumcot), and six accessions of wild European plum (<jats:italic>P. domestica</jats:italic>). Out of the 42 ISSR primers, 12 were selected, which generated 103 markers in total, 99 of which were polymorphic. Possible accession-specific ISSR bands or patterns were also found. Some possible synonyms or homonyms were clarified or discussed, and closely related accessions such as bud mutants were discriminated. Based on the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) analysis and principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) using the Jaccard coefficient, two different dendrograms were constructed—one including accessions grouped by species and one with all 104 accessions—and a two-dimensional plot was obtained. Three groups were formed in both dendrograms and PCoA plot: Group I including apricot (‘Yinxiangbai’) and plumcot types; Group II containing Asia-originated diploid species [e.g., <jats:italic>P. cerasifera</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>P. ussuriensis</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>P. tomentosa</jats:italic>, and Chinese plum-types (i.e., <jats:italic>P. salicina</jats:italic> and its hybrids)]; and Group III involving European-origin polyploid species (e.g., <jats:italic>P. spinosa</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>P. domestica</jats:italic>) and recently found wild European plum accessions in China. The dendrogram with accessions grouped by species implied that 1) plumcot types had closer relatedness with apricot than with plum; 2) <jats:italic>P. simonii</jats:italic> should be a variant of <jats:italic>P. salicina</jats:italic> while <jats:italic>P. ussuriensis</jats:italic> an independent species; 3) <jats:italic>P. domestica</jats:italic> was more closely related to <jats:italic>P. spinosa</jats:italic> than to <jats:italic>P. cerasifera</jats:italic>. Two accessions of European plum (‘89-7-3’ and ‘Wanhei’) were clustered into outgroups in the dendrogram with all 104 accessions, which could been grouped within Group III in the PCoA plot. The distribution of both European plum and Chinese plum-types across respective groups did not reflect the geographic origins. The present study also further confirmed that the wild plants found in Xinjiang of China were <jats:italic>P. domestica</jats:italic>.</jats:p>

Genetic Diversity, Antioxidant Activities, and Anthocyanin Contents in Lingonberry

“…ISSRs cost less and are easier to use than amplified fragmentlength polymorphisms (AFLPs) and do not require prior knowledge of flanking sequences, like SSRs (Reddy et al, 2002). ISSR markers are thought to be particularly useful for study of closely related individuals that exhibit low levels of polymorphism (Zietkiewicz et al, 1994) and have been applied as a very useful alternative to fingerprinting and genetic analysis in fruit crops including strawberry (Debnath et al, 2008), raspberry (Debnath, 2007a), clematis (Gardner and Hokanson, 2005), and plum (Liu et al, 2007).…”

Genetic Relatedness in Prunus Genus Revealed by Inter-simple Sequence Repeat Markers

“…This could be explained by possible repeated backcrossing plum-apricot hybrids with plums. However, Liu et al (2007) reported that hybrids of plum and apricot were more similar to apricot than the plum. The difference between the two studies could be explained by the used multiple male parents, which made their genetic background rather complex.…”

“…This method has been used in several fruit crops such as olive (Terzopoulos et al, 2005), pistachio (Kafkas et al, 2006), plum (Lisek et al, 2007), citrus (Shahsavar et al, 2007), and mulberry (Vijayan and Chatterjee, 2003;Vijayan et al, 2006aVijayan et al, , 2006b for the purposes of cultivar identification, germplasm characterization, natural population diversity evaluation, phylogenetic relationship analysis, genetic linkage mapping, and marker-assisted selection. The ISSR was also applied in genus Prunus (Goulao et al, 2001;Liu et al, 2007) and showed higher reproducibility and percentage of polymorphism than AFLP (Goulao et al, 2001). In addition, Turkish Prunus genotypes have only been characterized by morphological data so far and, in other words, no comparative studies on the molecular diversity among subgenera and sections in Turkish Prunus had been done.…”

Physical and chemical attributes of various cultivars of Plum fruit

“…Plums are the fruit of temperate zone, but however they are grown throughout the globe, from the temperate climatic conditions of Ciberia to that of subtropical climatic conditions of the Mediterranean regions [2]. China has taken a lead in the production of plum fruits in the overall world with total annual production of 4,635,600 metric tons [3]. Pakistan has offered 6700 hactares of its total land for producing 56200 tonnes of plum fruits.…”