THE USE OF MICROSATELLITES TO INVESTIGATE THE HOMOZYGOUS STATUS OF APPLE PLANTS OBTAINED BY ANTHER CULTURE AND PARTHENOGENESIS IN SITU

Putative homozygous shoots of different apple donor-cultivars were obtained by two techniques : anther culture (‘Braeburn’) and parthenogenesis in situ (‘Idared’, ‘Elstar’ and ‘Delbard Jubilé’). To investigate the true condition of these shoots, fourteen microsatellite primer combinations were applied.
All these SSR primer combinations were previously mapped on two different apple linkage maps and the distribution of these primer pairs over the whole apple genome was proved (Gianfranceschi et al., 1998; Guilford et al., 1997; Maliepaard et al., 1998). Therefore the application of these SSR primer pairs should give a good discrimination between homozygous and heterozygous status of the investigated shoots.
At first, PCR amplification with the different primer pairs was performed on the donor cultivars ‘Idared’, ‘Elstar’, ‘Delbard Jubilé’ and ‘Braeburn’. Only those primer pairs which amplified two different contrasting alleles could be used to investigate the homozygous status of the putatively homozygous offspring.
Most of the microsatellites tested could be used to make a definitive discrimination between homozygous and heterozygous shoots.
The results indicated that all of the shoots from anther culture analysed so far were homozygous, but none of the parthenogenetic shoots were.
However, the small total number of analysed parthenogenetic shoots and their inexplicable allelic composition precluded making definitive conclusions about parthenogenesis in situ.

Eucarpia symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

K. Kenis, J. Keulemans

Malus x domestica, Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs)

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2000.538.101