Data from: Plum germplasm in Croatia and neighbouring countries assessed by microsatellites and DUS descriptors

Abstract

At a certain period during the last century, former Yugoslavia (which among others used to include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia) was the biggest producer of plums in the world. Traditional plum cultivars, still grown in this region, represent a mixture of several species including: European plums (Prunus domestica L.), mirabelles (Prunus insititia var. syriaca (Borkh.) Koehne), and damsons (P. insititia L.). The basic problem with the utilization of this plum germplasm, either for cultivation or breeding purposes, is a lack of reliable pomology data or reference repositories that would enable positive identification of cultivars. In this study, 62 plum accessions (42 traditional Croatian accessions, six well-known traditional accessions collected from Serbia and Bosnia, and 14 international, reference cultivars) were assessed using microsatellite markers and distinctness, uniformity, and stability (DUS) plum descriptors. Nine primer pairs amplified 168 distinct alleles, or on average 18.7 alleles per locus. A significant differentiation between the traditional plum cultivars and international reference cultivars, was detected through Fst (Fst = 0.022; P < 0.0001), analyses of molecular variance (AMOVA; f CT = 0.054; P < 0.05) and later confirmed by a factorial correspondence analysis (FCA). Bayesian method enabled the classification of mirabelle, damson, and European plum genotypes. Principal component analyses, based on 22 morphologic traits, managed to separate mirabelle accession from the European plum and damson accessions, but there was a general lack of correlation between the observed morphologic traits and the molecular data. Results of this study indicate that traditional Croatian accessions represent a diverse and underutilized plant genetic material, which should be conserved