Abstract

Chile is the second largest exporter of fresh plums in the Americas and the sixth largest in the world, and also has important breeding programs in the Prunus genus, including the program of the University of Chile which has recently released 'Sweet Pekeetah' (SPK), a Japanese plum (Prunus salicina L.) with high fruit quality and long storage potential. To guarantee high fruit set and yield, the choice of an adequate polleniser is mandatory. With the aim to identify the best polleniser for SPK, we ran paternity tests based on SSR markers in seedlings obtained from open pollination variant of SPK plants in three geographically separated orchards. We identified 10 potential pollenisers with overlapping blooming time with SPK. Sixty-four Prunus simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were amplified to check for polymorphism and allele diversity. In total 286 alleles of sizes between 82 and 600 bp were determined in agarose gels. A set of four markers with the highest polymorphism (CPSCT018, CPSCT030, BPPCT007 and CPSCT039, with a total of 34 alleles) were chosen to genotype a total of 352 seedlings through capillary electrophoresis. This analysis yielded a 60.5% of effectiveness on the assignment of the male parent from the 10 analyzed pollenisers. In addition, our results pointed that SPK showed high compatibility with most of the 10 pollenisers. Furthermore, these results could be helpful in identifying of full-sibs from the whole half-sib population (352 seedlings), allowing to perform more targeted and precise studies for fruit quality trait genetic dissection.