INTER-COMPATIBILITY RELATIONSHIPS IN OLIVE AS REVEALED BY PATERNITY TESTS WITH SSR MARKERS

Fruit set has been the most commonly used method to test cross compatibility between olive cultivars up to date.
The study of pollen tube growth has been traditionally used to evaluate this phenomenon.
However, up to now, no evaluation of the final success of the performed crosses has been done.
In the last decades, molecular markers, especially microsatellites, offer the possibility to test the paternity of seedlings of a given cross in a rapid and accurate way.
We have used this technology to investigate the compatibility of the cultivars used as parents in the olive breeding program of Córdoba, Spain.
From 1993 to 2006, many of the progenies obtained have been tested for its purity.
In general, the response has been qualitative, progenies were totally pure or totally contaminated.
Additionally, a given cross and its reciprocal always behave in the same manner (compatible or incompatible). This may indicate the existence of a simple mechanism of cross-compatibility in olive, which, until now, remains unknown.
In the present work, the compatibility relationships between the olive cultivars used in the forenamed breeding program are reported.
As it has been previously mentioned, those relations have been obtained empirically by testing the paternity of the progenies.
The study of the compatibility mechanism in olive seems to be of paramount importance to increase the efficiency of the species breeding programs.

XII EUCARPIA Symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

E. Rodríguez-Castillo, A. Díaz, A. Belaj, R. De la Rosa

Olea europaea, microsatellites, crosses, compatibility, breeding program

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.814.112