Abstract

Traditional identification of peach and nectarine varieties relies on the assessment of agronomic traits of the adult plant. This leads to a significant delay of time, constraints to breeders in the surveillance of germplasm and a risk for fruit growers and exporters. We describe a method for rapid assessment of peach and nectarine varieties based on AFLP fingerprinting and extraction of high quality DNA. The best primer pairs were selected from 64 primer combinations that reliably distinguished 8 peach and 6 nectarine varieties. A graphical representation of the detected polymorphisms was shown to simplify the analysis.