Ozgecan Yalcin is a Master’s student in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, under the supervision of her academic advisors, Dr. Nahla Bassil, and Dr. Claire Luby. She is conducting her studies in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)-Agricultural Research Service (ARS)-National Clonal Germplasm Repository (NCGR) in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. One of the projects she has been working on for her master’s thesis is “Confirming identity of blueberry cultivars with a microsatellite fingerprinting set.” The USDA-ARS-NCGR in Corvallis Oregon preserves genetic resources of fruit and nut crops. The NCGR is a part of the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), which is a collaborative effort by public and private organizations to protect the genetic diversity of plants, and aims to acquire, conserve, evaluate, document, and distribute crop germplasm. The NCGR maintains more than 1,800 Vaccinium L. accessions represented by 83 Vaccinium taxa from 34 countries. The ability to confirm the genotypic identity of the blueberry cultivars in the NCGR is crucial to genebank management. Previously, a 10-SSR fingerprinting set of tri-nucleotide-containing-SSRs in blueberry was developed and utilized together with parentage analysis to confirm identity in 297 plants representing 143 unique accessions from the collection. Four categories of plants were observed: true-to-type (TTT), where morphology, SSR markers, and parentage analysis agreed; identity ok (IDOK), where a unique genotype was produced in multiple plants from different sources but parentage analysis was incomplete; identity question (IDQ), where allele composition did not match parentage and more testing is needed to confirm identity; and identity wrong (IDX), where incorrect identity is confirmed by parentage analysis and replacement with TTT is required. The objectives of this study were to confirm the identity of accessions in the IDOK (7) and IDQ (13) categories, replace accessions in the IDX (2) category with TTT genotypes, and create baseline fingerprints for the remaining cultivated blueberries (53) in the collection. Leaf samples from each of the cultivars in the IDOK, IDQ and IDX categories were obtained from multiple sources such as breeders and nurseries and were genotyped with this fingerprinting set. Parentage analysis using TTT parents or offspring was able to confirm the identities of some of these cultivars. This study enables a protocol that can ensure clonal identity of the blueberry cultivars in the NCGR collection.
Ozgecan Yalcin won the ISHS Young Minds Award for the best poster presentation at the XII International Vaccinium Symposium, which was held virtually in Canada in August 2021.
Ozgecan Yalcin, Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97330, USA, e-mail: yalcinozgecan@gmail
The article is available in Chronica Horticulturae