Abstract
Cultivation of chestnut (Castanea sativa) has a long tradition in Italy, where traditional cultivars have been selected over centuries in function of the best nut traits. Nevertheless, these traditional cultivars are usually described and classified according to geographic origin, ripening period and type of use, thus making cataloguing very difficult. In this work, 87 grafted chestnuts corresponding to 26 cultivar names from Italy were evaluated by seven simple sequence repeats (SSRs) loci to establish if they correspondance to clones. The results showed 20 different genotypes, and 52 alleles were identified, eight of which were exclusive. Some cases of homonymies and synonymies were detected. It was stated that 'Marrone-type' cultivars displayed a considerable genetic uniformity. These results highlighted a high genetic diversity within the material studied and revealed the existence of valuable germplasm within these Italian traditional cultivars.
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