APPLE GENE BANKS – FOR BREEDING, RESEARCH OR PUBLIC ENTERTAINMENT?

In many countries, public funding of applied research, including breeding and maintenance of genetic resource collections, is decreasing rapidly.
A survey was undertaken to investigate various factors concerning the maintenance of apple gene banks in 22 different countries.
In many cases, funding was available mainly for ‘mandate’ or ‘heirloom’ cultivars that are either indigenous or have (or used to have) considerable socio-cultural interest in that particular country.
The major aims are usually to preserve these cultivars for future generations, and to provide propagation material and fruit for public events like fruit exhibitions.
Nevertheless, ‘breeding’ and ‘research’ were the two most important present-day uses of these gene banks.
This discrepancy raises the question: how useful are collections with mandate or heirloom cultivars for breeding and research? RAPD- and SSR-based analyses indicate that Swedish mandate cultivars have the same levels of overall variation as a set of international cultivars.
Moreover, the mandate cultivars show no geographic differentiation.
For some traits, mandate cultivar collections however show a lower range of diversity (e.g. content of certain phenolic compounds) or somewhat deviating gene frequencies (e.g. S-alleles) when compared to a wider range of cultivars.
Serious efforts must clearly be made to ensure the availability of gene banks with material aimed for breeding and research also in the future.

XII EUCARPIA Symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

H. Nybom, L. Garkava-Gustavsson

apple allergen, DNA marker, genetic diversity, Malus x domestica, phenolic compound, S-allele

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.814.4