Fruit antioxidant capacity and self-incompatibility genotype of Ukrainian sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivars highlight their breeding prospects

Breeding for higher levels of health-promoting components are among the priorities for many fruit crops. Such an approach requires breeding material displaying great variations in the trait to be improved. Commercial sweet cherry cultivars demonstrate only limited variability in fruit antioxidant parameters and hence this study was carried out to characterize some Ukrainian sweet cherry cultivars for their antioxidant and antiradical capacity and total phenolic and anthocyanin contents. Ukrainian cultivars had significantly higher ferric reducing antioxidant power and total phenolic contents compared with commercial cultivars. Levels of all four parameters varied considerably in the Ukrainian germplasm, with some cultivars having outstanding values. A total of eight different self-incompatibility genotypes were assigned to the 14 accessions tested. Assigning cultivars to the appropriate incompatibility groups allowed the design of parental combinations which may result in new genotypes with enhanced functional properties and other valuable fruit traits. Based on the S-genotypes, parental combinations were proposed to ensure 50 or 100 % self-compatible seedlings in the offspring population. The most perspective Ukrainian cultivars like 'Dagestanka' and 'Kodrinskaya' also had reasonable fruit weight (over 8 g), high flesh to pit ratio (approx. 18) and soluble solid contents (over 16 %). Our results demonstrated that adequate variation is available in Ukrainian germplasm for improving fruit health benefits in sweet cherry through directed hybridizations.