Genetic Diversity of Hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) Germplasm in Northeastern Spain

Abstract

<jats:p>In Spain, hazelnut is mainly cultivated in Catalonia, a region in the northeast. The province of Tarragona accounts for 88% of the total Spanish area planted to hazelnut. Almost 80% of the production in Tarragona is of the local cultivar Negret, with others cultivated to a lesser extent. Minor cultivars are only sporadically present in older orchards, farm yards and gardens, and have been collected for preservation. In this work, 16 SSR markers were used to fingerprint 18 minor hazelnut cultivars from northeastern Spain. Their microsatellite profiles were combined with those of 15 Spanish cultivars characterized in a previous work, and used to study the genetic diversity in 33 genotypes including local Spanish germplasm. The SSR analysis allowed development of unique profiles of each of the 18 cultivars, and no new case of synonymy was detected. A high level of genetic diversity (mean <jats:italic>H</jats:italic><jats:sub>e</jats:sub> = 0.7) was observed in 33 genotypes, although a high number of them showed a close genetic relationship. The dendrogram generated by UPGMA cluster analysis placed the 33 accessions into nine main groups, related to their putative pedigrees or geographical area of cultivation. All investigated Negret-type cultivars were found to be distinct from Negret, and only a few cultivars within this germplasm appeared to be seedlings of Negret. The results will be useful in the conservation of hazelnut germplasm and in the selection of parents for use in breeding.</jats:p>

Investigating the origin of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) cultivars using chloroplast microsatellites

“…Trueness-to-type of the accessions was previously verified by Boccacci et al (2005Boccacci et al ( , 2008 and Ghanbari et al (2005) using nSSR markers. The cultivars were assigned to four groups on the basis of their country of origin (Table 1).…”

“…nSSR loci have been used to fingerprint and to identify mistakes in hazelnut accessions from several germplasm repositories Gökirmak et al 2008). These studies investigated genetic relationships among cultivars grown in important production areas, identified accessions with identical fingerprints, and suggested the parentage for several cultivars (Boccacci et al 2006(Boccacci et al , 2008Ghanbari et al 2005;Gökirmak et al 2008). In particular, Boccacci et al (2006) and Gökirmak et al (2008) concluded that cultivars from Italy and Spain are genetically related.…”

Genetic diversity in hazelnut (Corylus avellanaL.) cultivars from Black Sea countries assessed using SSR markers

“…2005). In Europe, 16 SSR loci were used to fingerprint 78 cultivars in Italy and 18 minor cultivars in Spain (Boccacci et al. 2006, 2008).…”

Genetic diversity revealed by morphological traits and ISSR markers in hazelnut germplasm from northern Spain

“…Hazelnut is monoecious, dichogamous, wind pollinated and has sporophytic incompatibility controlled by a single S‐locus with multiple alleles (Thompson 1979, Mehlenbacher 1997). European hazelnut shows a high level of phenotypic diversity and numerous cultivars have been described based on their nut and husk phenotypes (Alvarez Requejo 1965, Tasias Valls 1975, Boccacci et al. 2008).…”

“…2006). SSR markers were used to analyse genetic relationships among cultivars (Boccacci et al. 2006, 2008, Gökirmak et al.…”