Genetic diversity in fruiting and flower-ornamental Japanese apricot (Prunus mume) germplasms assessed by SSR markers

Abstract

The genetic diversity and relationships among 127 Japanese apricot (Prunus mume Siebold et Zucc.) germplasms, including 56 fruiting and 55 flower-ornamental cultivars derived from Japan, 8 germplasms from China, 7 germplasms from Taiwan and 1 germplasm from Thailand were assessed by SSR markers. Thirtynine out of 58 SSR markers developed from peach and apricot could produce one or two amplified fragments in Japanese apricot, suggesting transferability across species. Fourteen SSR markers showing clear amplification and high polymorphisms were chosen for further analysis. A total of 155 putative alleles were observed in Japanese apricot for 14 SSR loci with an average value of 11.1. The values of observed heterozygosity (H O ) and expected heterozygosity (H E ) ranged from 0.29 to 0.88 (mean value of 0.61) and 0.32 to 0.92 (mean value of 0.68), respectively. A phenogram for 127 Japanese apricot and 3 apricot germplasms showed 3 major clusters, 1) Bungo group of Japanese apricot and apricot, 2) germplasms from Taiwan and Thailand, 3) fruiting and flower-ornamental germplasms derived from Japan and China. In the present study, definite genetic differences were not found between fruiting and flower-ornamental groups, which supported the hypothesis that fruiting cultivars have been selected from flower-ornamentals.

Development of Simple Sequence Repeat Markers for Identification of Japanese Gentian Cultivars

“…In comparison, 58 Asian pear cultivars were differentiated by nine SSR markers with a total of 133 putative alleles by Kimura et al (2002). Moreover, 111 Japanese apricot, 41 carnation, and 51 olive cultivars could be discriminated by 14, 13, and seven SSR loci, respectively (Díaz et al, 2006;Hayashi et al, 2008;Kimura et al, 2009); therefore, the remaining 43 SSR primer sets developed in this study might be useful for discrimination of a greater number of gentian cultivars. The allele numbers detected by SCAR markers based on intron length polymorphism of flavonoid bio- Table 5.…”

“…Thus, we attempted to develop SSR markers containing di-nucleotide repeats applicable to Japanese gentian. To isolate SSR loci from plants lacking genomic and cDNA sequence information, several protocols, such as the screening of a genomic library by SSR probes (Chiba et al, 2003;Suwabe et al, 2002), utilization of SSR markers from closed species (Hayashi et al, 2008;Shiran et al, 2007), construction of an SSR-enriched library (Díaz et al, 2006;Nunome et al, 2006), and sequencing of amplified ISSR fragments (Hayden et al, 2004;Lian et al, 2001Lian et al, , 2006, have been developed. Our preliminary experiments using suppression PCR (Lian et al, 2001) to isolate SSRs in Japanese gentian were inefficient, although the reason was not clearly understood (data not shown).…”

“…SSRs are tandemly repeated sequence motifs 1-6 bp in length and are widely present in the eukaryotic genome. Therefore, SSR markers have been applied to discriminate cultivars in many crops, such as soybean (Hossain et al, 2000), fruit trees including apple (Goulão and Oliveira, 2001), olive (Díaz et al, 2006), peach (Dirlewanger et al, 2002;Yamamoto et al, 2003), sweet cherry (Dirlewanger et al, 2002), pear (Kimura et al, 2002), Japanese apricot (Hayashi et al, 2008), and almond (Shiran et al, 2007), in vegetable crops including melon (Chiba et al, 2003), strawberry (Shimomura and Hirashima, 2006), eggplant (Nunome et al, 2009), Brassica rapa (Suwabe et al, 2002, and cucumber (Fukino et al, 2008), and floricultural plants including pelargonium (Becher et al, 2000) and carnation (Smulders et al, 2003). In Gentiana, ten SSR markers were developed for the Chinese medicinal plant G. crassicaulis (Li et al, 2007); however, since G. crassicaulis belongs to a different taxonomic section from the Japanese cultivated gentians G. triflora and G. scabra (Ho and Liu, 2001), these SSR markers could not be successfully applied to Japanese gentians.…”

Genetic Diversity in Apricot

“…However their study placed Hungarian cultivars closer to the Central Asian group than to the other European cultivars. Hayashi et al (2008) studied Japanese apricot (Prunus mume) germplasm and reported that the genetic diversity and relationships among 127 Japanese apricot germplasms assessed by SSR markers. Their study supported the two hypotheses that Japanese apricot cultivated in Japan had been introduced from China and that fruiting cultivars had been selected from flower-ornamentals.…”

Assessing the genetic relationships of Curcuma alismatifolia varieties using simple sequence repeat markers

“…Among the molecular markers available, microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSR), which are tandem repeats of 1-6 nucleotide long DNA motifs, have gained considerable importance in plant genetics and breeding because of their multi-allelic nature, codominant inheritance, high abundance, extensive genome coverage, reproducibility, and discriminatory power (Kalia et al, 2011). A variety of molecular marker techniques have been developed for measuring genetic variability/similarity in ornamental plants, such as random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD; Anthurium andraeanum and Chrysanthemum) (Nowbuth et al, 2005;Lapitan et al, 2007;Barakat et al, 2010), ISSR (Rose) (Jabbarzadeh et al, 2010), and SSR (Prunus mume and Nelumbonucifera) (Tian et al, 2008;Hayashi et al, 2008). Moreover, several molecular studies have employed various DNA markers in Curcuma spp.…”