ESTABLISHMENT OF A CORE COLLECTION TO OPTIMISE THE CONSERVATION OF CHERIMOYA (ANNONA CHERIMOLA MILL.) GENETIC RESOURCES USING SSR INFORMATION

The management and evaluation of large germplasm collections is expensive and inefficient due to redundancies and/or duplications and the impossibility of analyzing with detail all the accessions conserved, particularly in fruit tree species.
Thus, collection management can be significantly improved if the regeneration, characterization, and evaluation steps are focused on a subset of individuals, denominated ‘core collection’, that represent the diversity conserved in the whole germplasm collection.
Although molecular markers are becoming the tool of choice for the development of core collections in plants, the examples of their use to develop core collections in fruit species are very scarce.
In this work, we used SSR marker data to develop a core collection in an underutilized subtropical fruit tree species, cherimoya (Annona cherimola Mill.), from an initial collection of 279 genotypes from different countries.
We compared six alternative allocation methods to construct the core collection.
The best subset was obtained with 40 accessions.
In this subset, all the SSR alleles present in the whole collection were recovered and no significant differences in frequency distribution of alleles for any of the loci studied or in variability parameters were recorded between the core and the whole collection.

XII EUCARPIA Symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

P. Escribano, M.A. Viruel, J.I. Hormaza

ex situ conservation, germplasm management, plant genetic resources

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.814.3