[EN] Melon (Cucumis melo) is one of the principal vegetable crops for fresh market, for which a large number of
breeding programs, oriented to generate inbred pure lines and hybrids, is established worldwide. The process to obtain
and select these lines has been highly accelerated by the use of biotechnological techniques such as the generation of
doubled haploid line (DHL) populations andmolecular markers.Moreover, the use of DHLs in genetic studies is a useful
tool because of their complete homozygosity and the permanent availability of plant material perpetuated by seed. In
this work, the parthenogenetic response of 17 melon genotypes and the F1 hybrid PI 161375 · Spanish cultivar Piel de
Sapo (PS) was studied considering three stages along the in vitro DHL generation process. The response of the analyzed
melon cultivars was heterogeneous through the DHL generation with different limiting steps for each genotype. The
response of the PI 161375 · PS hybrid was more similar to the male (PS) than the female parent (PI 161375), although
the response of the maternal genotype was higher for some stages. This points to the important role of alleles from both
parents in the different steps of theDHL generation process, and it could explain the identification of six genomic regions
with distorted allelic segregation skewed toward PS or PI 161375. This hybrid was used to generate a population of 109
DHLs, the gametophytic origin of which was confirmed by flow cytometry and molecular markers.This work was supported in part by the Spanish seed company Semillas Fit´o S.A. (Barcelona, Spain) and the research projects AGL2000-03602, AGL2003-09175-C02-01, and 2FD1997-0325 financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and with the support of the Ministry of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise of Catalonia.Gonzalo, MJ.; Claveria, E.; Monforte Gilabert, AJ.; Dolcet-Sanjuan, R. (2011). Parthenogenic haploids in melon (Cucumis melo L.): generation and molecular characterization of a doubled haploid line population. Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science. 136(2):145-154. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/28324S145154136
