Identification of S-haplotypes in autochthonous, released and promising sour cherry genotypes originated from the Republic of Serbia

Abstract

Sour cherry (Prunus cerasus L.) is one of the main perennial fruit crops in the Republic of Serbia (RS), whose average production of 117,595 tonnes (2012-2021) ranking it as the third most widely grown after plum and apple. As for the sour cherry assortment structure in the RS, clones of ‘Oblačinska’ are the most widespread (over 60%), while the remaining part comprises large-fruited foreign cultivars, as well as domestic ‘Šumadinka’ released within the breeding programme of the Fruit Research Institute, Čačak (FRI). As the tetraploid species, sour cherry includes both self-incompatible (SI) and self-compatible (SC) genotypes, which are characterised by more complex genetics of SI/SC. Therefore, developing of SC sour cherry cultivars is of high priority within FRI breeding work and worldwide. The aim of this study was to identify the S-haplotypes in two autochthonous (clones of ‘Oblačinska’ and ‘Cigančica’), four developed within FRI breeding programme (‘Iskra’, ‘Nevena’, ‘Sofija’ and ‘Šumadinka’) and one promising (‘GV-10’) sour cherry genotypes originated from the RS. The use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method with three different consensus primer pairs for the first and the second introns of S-RNase, as well as primers specific for both S-RNase and SFB alleles, in combination with genetic tests to identify the pollen-part and stylar-part mutants (using derived cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence assay ‒ dCAPS), enabled identification of the S-haplotypes in the assessed sour cherry genotypes. In total, eight S-haplotypes (S1, S4, S6, S9, S13, S26, S35 and S36) or their non-functional variants were identified. In the investigated sour cherry genotypes, non-functional variant S36b2 was the most frequent (21.4%). The results generated in this study provide a valuable resource for design crosses in future breeding work which maximize the number of SC seedlings, and for orchard management in the efficient high-yielding fruit production.