Abstract
Increasing germplasm erosion requires the recovery and conservation of traditional cultivars before they disappear. Here we present a particular case in Spain where a thorough prospection of local fruit tree species was performed in the 1950s with detailed data of the origin of each genotype but, unfortunately, the accessions are no longer conserved in ex situ germplasm collections. However, for most of those cultivars, an old stone collection is still preserved. In order to analyze the diversity present at the time when the prospection was made and to which extent variability has been eroded, we developed a protocol in apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) to obtain DNA from maternal tissues of the stones of a sufficient quality to be amplified by PCR. The results obtained have been compared with the results from the profiles developed from apricot cultivars currently conserved in ex situ germplasm collections. The results highlight the fact that most of the old accessions are not conserved ex situ but provide a tool to prioritize the recovery of particular cultivars. The approach used in this work can also be applied to other plant species where seeds have been preserved.
Highlights
The development of new technologies, the substitution of local varieties by foreign improved varieties or changes in cultural techniques have resulted in an increasing erosion of germplasm resources that leads to the need of optimizing the conservation of endangered germplasm [1]
In a second step we evaluated the variability of this material in relation to cultivars currently preserved in ex situ collections
In the case of fresh apricot material from the ex situ collection, DNA was successfully recovered from leaves
Summary
The development of new technologies, the substitution of local varieties by foreign improved varieties or changes in cultural techniques have resulted in an increasing erosion of germplasm resources that leads to the need of optimizing the conservation of endangered germplasm [1]. Apricot is a diploid species, with eight pair of chromosomes (2n = 16) and a small genome (5.96108 bp) [6] that is believed to have originated in the Tien-Shan Mountains, in Central Asia, from where it was disseminated both east and westward [7]. In the last ten years a clear effort has been made to characterise apricot germplasm in different parts of the world [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] generally showing a regional distribution that probably reflects independent selection in each region and later vegetative propagation of selected genotypes through grafting
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