Abstract

The Japanese plum is a diploid, allogamous and self-incompatible species. The self-incompatibility ensures outcrossing, reduces the inbreeding rate and maintains high level of genetic variability within populations. The genetic characterization of parental lines and its progenies is an useful tool for assess the progress of breeding programs. That allows verifying the remanent level of genetic diversity and the efficiency of breeding cycles. In this work, a base population of 29 cultivars of Japanese plums was evaluated through 17 microsatellites. The results showed a high level of genetic diversity among cultivars and a high discriminating power with a low number of microsatellites. Thus, the microsatellites allelic frequencies allowed to carry out a paternity test to a population of 112 offspring developed in our breeding program. Microsatellites displayed a high discriminating power to verify the paternity assignment to each generated progeny. Moreover, this study allows analyzing the reproductive biology of Japanese plum.