Full Length Research Paper

Identification of the S-genotypes of several sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivars by AS-PCR and pollination

Hongxia Wang^{1, 2}, KaiChun Zhang³, Naihaoye^{2, 4}*and Huairui Su² 

¹Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao 266071, China.

²College of Horticulture Science and Engineering, Shandong Agriculture University, Tai’an, Shandong 271018, China.

³Institute of Forestry and Pomology, Beijing Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 10093, China.

⁴Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Qingdao 266071, China.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: yenh@ysfri.ac.cn.  Tel: 0086 0532 85822957.

Accepted 30 November, 2009

   Abstract

Sweet cherry cultivars display a self-incompatibility system that restricts self-fertilization and fertilization between cultivars bearing identical S-alleles. PCR-based S-allele typing system for sweet cherry cultivars has been recently developed. It has been reported that all known self-incompatibility (S) alleles of sweet cherry were more than 16 based on the AS-PCR analysis. In this work, two sets of AS-PCR primers that were designed based on conserved domains of cDNA sequences of S-RNases has been used to characterize the S-genotype of 38 sweet cherry cultivars, including 15 cultivars whose S-genotype had not been previously described. Pollination test was also performed to validate the PCR results, and the consistent results were got. A wide variation in the frequency of S-alleles in the Sweet cherry germplasm was observed. S₃ was the most common in the cultivars evaluated, and S₇, S₁₀-S₁₆, S₂₃-S₂₅ as rare allele was not found in China geographical areas in our study.

Key words: Self-incompatibility, Prunus avium, S-RNase, AS-PCR, pollination test.