PLANT CULTIVAR IDENTIFICATION AND REGISTRATION – THE ROLE FOR MOLECULAR TECHNIQUES

The grant of Plant Breeders’ rights to a new applicant cultivar under the UPOV (The International Union for the Protection of new Varieties of Plants), system of intellectual property protection is normally linked to a detailed technical examination.
This usually involves observation of the morphological and physiological characteristics of the applicant cultivar in a growing trial to provide an official description that, by comparison with appropriate reference cultivars, can be used to establish its distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS).
The ever-increasing rate at which new cultivars are being produced by plant breeders has meant that the registration authorities carrying out or commissioning these technical examinations face major resource problems because of the scale of such growing trials.
There are also increasing technical problems in achieving distinctness from the large numbers of cultivars that now make up the reference collections for many important plant species.
In these circumstances, the potential of molecular systems for producing robust and reliable cultivar descriptions, suitable for database use and largely unaffected by environment, has become increasingly attractive.
Their potential for application in cultivar registration is therefore under careful and active consideration within UPOV. However, it is clear that the power of molecular techniques could potentially allow discrimination between cultivars down to the very small differences of a few base-pairs within the genome.
Therefore, before their possible introduction, it has been necessary to consider how to ensure that sufficient genetic distance between varieties is maintained to be able to give the certainty of continuing protection to the breeders of existing cultivars.
This paper aims to explore some of the technical aspects of these issues that UPOV is trying to resolve before the introduction of molecular techniques for cultivar registration.