Establishment of core collection from apricot germplasm in China

Abstract

This study aimed at establishing a core collection based on the analysis of data from simple sequence repeat (SSR) alleles and morphological and agronomical traits (MOR) of the primary core collection from apricot germplasm resources. The index of genetic diversity, and frequency ratios of retention and loss of the alleles were studied between cluster and random sampling methods at five sampling ratios. The results demonstrate that the cluster sampling method preceded random sampling, and cluster sampling of SSR combined with MOR at the rate of 80% was the best sampling strategy among all the sampling methods. Based on this sampling strategy, 120 accessions were selected as the core collection of apricot, which retained 100% alleles in the primary core collection and 100% phenotypic characters. The core collection developed had also been evaluated by using the data of six quantitative traits, which showed that the established core collection could well represent the genetic diversity of the original collection of 1501 apricot accessions.

Keywords: Apricot, core collection, sampling strategy, simple sequence repeat (SSR) molecular marker

African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(37), pp. 5577-5587