Microsatellite Markers (SSR) as a Tool to Assist in Identification of Sweet (Prunus avium) and Sour Cherry (Prunus cerasus)

Sweet (Prunus avium L.) and sour cherries (Prunus cerasus L.) are two economically important species in Europe. The capability to distinguish among cherry cultivars in breeding, cultivation and germplasm collection is extremely important for scientific as well as for economic reasons. Normally morphological traits are used to identify cultivars but these traits are often differently expressed in different environments and production practices. Our objective was, parallel to the usual morphological identifying methods, to fingerprint a subset of 43 sweet- and 30 sour cherry cultivars with 15 SSR primers, to determine if there was sufficient polymorphism to differentiate the cultivars. Furthermore, to establish one routine method for cultivar identification for cherries at the KOB research station. The 15 SSR markers generated a total of 100 alleles in sweet cherry and 128 alleles in sour cherry. PIC for the 15 SSR loci varied from 0.593 to 0.874 with an average of 0.713 on sweet cherry and from 0.615 to 0.917 with an average of 0.803 on sour cherry. Primer pair EMPaJ15 was the most informative and EMPaS14 was the least informative in the analysed sweet cherry cultivars; Primer pair UCD-CH17 was the most informative and UDP98-410 was the least informative in the analysed sour cherry cultivars. In total, there is sufficient polymorphism to differentiate the sweet-and sour cherry cultivars with these 15 Prunus primer pairs.