Recovery, morphological and molecular characterization of globe artichoke ‘Romanesco’ landraces

Abstract

The 'Romanesco' globe artichoke is of substantial economic importance for Italy, its major world producer. The widespread adoption of single early uniform micropropagated clones has led to erosion of local genetic resources. In an attempt to characterise landrace diversity for future breeding activities and/or germplasm conservation, a set of 19 clones derived from plants cultivated in traditional areas of Latium region were typed using a combination of morphological traits (UPOV descriptors) and DNA markers (AFLP and ISSR). Principal Component Analysis and significant correlations among some of the morphological traits showed that a reduced number of descriptors could be used efficiently to discriminate between the clones. Stepwise regression analysis identified a number of significant and consistent associations between certain morphological characters and marker loci. Heritability for important economic traits were computed; moreover, remarkable clones for future breeding activities were recognized. The variability present within the farmers' fields is an important factor in the design of a rational strategy of in situ germplasm conservation. AbbreviationsTNH Total number of heads E Time of appearance of the central head LH1 Length of the first order head on the lateral shoots NH Number of primary and secondary heads NH1 Number of first order heads NH2 Number of secondary heads WH1 Weight of the primary heads WH2 Total weight of the secondary heads DH1 Diameter of the first order head on the lateral shoots LCH Length of central head WCH Weight of the central head DCH Diameter of the central head MSL Main stem length PH Plant height P. Crinò and R. Tavazza have contributed equally to the work.

Genetic Diversity Assessment in European Cynara Collections

“…fragments present in only one accession) found by Crinò et al (2008) in 'Romanesco' clones is comparable to that observed by Lanteri et al (2004b) and Sonnante et al (2004Sonnante et al ( , 2007 in collections with all the global artichoke types. The predicted heterozygosity was different (0.37 versus 0.67) from that estimated in wild cardoon using SSR markers , probably because SSR loci are associated with a high number of detectable alleles, whereas AFLP and ISSR loci are dominant.…”

“…Some of the studies aim at (i) characterizing these landraces in terms of genetic and molecular profiles; (ii) investigating the genetic variability existing within and among landraces; (iii) identifying genetic resources for the development of future breeding programs. Landraces were clustered on the basis of morphological and molecular traits (Crinò et al 2008;Ciancolini et al 2012). These clusters agreed with the landraces' original area even if no significant correlation between genetic similarity and morphological trait matrices was revealed by the Mantel test.…”

“…Early varieties mature typically around autumn-winter of the southern Mediterranean, and continue to produce until spring, while the later maturing varieties, represented by spring cultivars (e.g. Romanesco), provide products from February to April (Crinò et al 2008). The nomenclature of both early and spring varieties is not always very clear and there are cases of homonyms.…”

“…In the last decade several molecular markers have been utilized in Cynara cardunculus populations, such as AFLP (Lanteri et al 2004a;Pagnotta et al 2004;Portis et al 2005;Mauro et al 2009;Acquadro et al 2010), RAPD (Lanteri et al 2001;Sonnante et al 2002), ISSR (Crinò et al 2008;Lo Bianco et al 2011) and SSR (Acquadro et al 2005;Sonnante et al 2008;Mauro et al 2009). The molecular markers were used mainly for variety identification and genetic diversity and relatedness investigations (Tivang et al 1996;Sonnante et al 2002Sonnante et al , 2008Crinò et al 2008), plant breeding as selection tools and to characterize parental lines in F1 hybrid constitution (Lo Bianco et al 2011), as well as to identify the most probable progenitors of a given hybrid (Messmer et al 2002). Furthermore, genetic linkage maps have also been recently developed in artichoke (Lanteri et al 2006;Lanteri and Portis 2008;Acquadro et al 2009;Portis et al 2009;Sonnante et al 2011b).…”

“…The degree of morphological plasticity expressed by globe artichoke increases the value of DNA markers since they are unaffected by variation in either the environment or the developmental stage. The complementarity of both morphological and molecular analyses can contribute to the accurate identification and classification of landraces in the management of plant genetic resources for in situ and ex situ conservation as well as for use in plant breeding programs (Crinò et al 2008;Lo Bianco et al 2012).…”