Genetic diversity of Prunus domestica selected from ten countries across Europe

A DNA marker-based study in European plum was performed within the project "Identification of a representative set of Prunus domestica accessions of European origin, well documented and characterized, to be included into the AEGIS system (PRUNDOC)" funded by Bioversity International under the European Cooperative Programme for Plant Genetic Resources (ECPGR) programme. A total of 46 local plum accessions from 10 European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Serbia, Slovakia and Sweden) were analysed using simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci. In addition, seven reference cultivars ('Bistrica', 'Hanita', 'Mirabelle de Nancy', 'Reine Claude Violette', 'Stanley', 'Valor' and 'Victoria') were analysed for standardization of allele sizes. The following nine primers were used: PacA33 is an EST-SSR developed in apricot, BPPCT039, BPPCT007, BPPCT014, BPPCT034, BPPCT040, UDP96 and UDP98 were developed from genomic peach DNA, while CPSCT026 was developed from genomic DNA of Japanese plum, Prunus salicina. None of the investigated local plum accessions were identical, nor were any of them identical to any of the reference cultivars. Genetic similarity among accessions was examined using Jaccard's similarity coefficients. The dendrogram obtained showed that the plum accessions did not group in a pattern corresponding to their country of origin.