Abstract

Apple (malus domestica Borkh.), which is a widely cultivated, important and economic fruit crop with nutritive and medicinal importance, has emerged as a model horticultural crop in this post-genomic era. Wild apple resources are important and they develop gradually in apple industry and genetic diversity. In this study, two molecular markers (inter-simple sequence repeats, ISSR and sequence-specific amplification polymorphism, S-SAP) were evaluated for genetic analysis of 31 wild apple resources in Shandong. A total of 20 ISSR primers were used and 110 polymorphic bands were amplified. Five S-SAP primer sets yielded a total of 496 bands, of which 201 (40.52%) were polymorphic. The similarity coefficient between resources ranged from 0.70 to 0.94 for ISSR analysis and from 0.66 to 0.95 using the S-SAP methodology. This study indicates that the results obtained based on the dendrograms constructed using unweighted pair-group using arithmetic average (UPGMA) cluster analysis were significantly correlated. The ISSR and S-SAP markers were found to be useful for wild apple resources identification and assessment of phonetic relationships.

Key words: Apple, wild resource, inter-simple sequence repeats (ISSR), sequence-specific amplification polymorphism (S-SAP).

Abbreviation

AFLP, Amplified fragment length polymorphism; ISSR, inter-simple sequence repeats; LTR, long terminal repeat; PCR, polymerase chain reaction;RAPD, random amplified polymorphic DNA; RFLP, restriction fragment length polymorphism; S-SAP, sequence-specific amplification polymorphism; SSR,simple sequence repeats.