Olive Breeding with Classical and Modern Approaches

The juvenile period represents a serious impediment in olive breeding programs. Seedlings with long juvenile period are of very low interest for the breeder because their evaluation considerably delays the first stages of the breeding process. For this reason, the influence of seedling vigour (measured as plant height or stem diameter) on the characteristics at the adult stage was studied to establish useful negative preselection criteria on the basis of that relationship. Olive progenies from crosses and open pollinations of 12 different parents carried out in 1998 and 1999 were evaluated in the greenhouse and, afterwards, during the first 3 years of bearing in the open field. The results obtained indicate that early evaluation and selection for juvenile period can be performed at the seedling stage in olive progenies on the basis of vigour measurements. Selection for short juvenile period was valid irrespective of parentage and, therefore, could be efficient in a general context. No relationship between juvenile period and yield or fruit traits was found so that this preselection criterion would have no adverse effects on these characters.

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Development of EST-derived SSR Markers with Long-core Repeat in Olive and Their Use for Paternity Testing

Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science ◽

10.21273/jashs.138.4.290 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 138 (4) ◽

pp. 290-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Raúl De la Rosa ◽

Angjelina Belaj ◽

Antonio Muñoz-Mérida ◽

Oswaldo Trelles ◽

Inmaculada Ortíz-Martín ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Ssr Markers ◽

Simple Sequence Repeats ◽

Expressed Sequence Tag ◽

Paternity Testing ◽

High Level ◽

Repeated Motifs ◽

Expressed Sequence ◽

Simple Sequence ◽

Olive Breeding ◽

Genomic Project

In the present work, a set of eight new hexa-nucleotide simple sequence repeats (SSRs) is reported in olive (Olea europaea L). These SSRs loci were generated on the basis of expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences in the frame of an olive genomic project. The markers showed a high level of polymorphism when tested on a set of cultivars used as genitors in the olive breeding program of Córdoba, Spain. The long-core repeat motif of these markers allows a wider separation among alleles, thus permitting an accurate genotyping. Besides, these markers showed comparable levels of polymorphism to di-nucleotide SSRs, the only ones so far reported in olive. Selected on the basis of their discrimination capacity, four of the eight SSRs were used to test their ability for paternity testing in a total of 81 seedlings coming from 12 crosses. The paternity testing showed that seven crosses matched the alleged paternity and the remaining five were products of illicit pollinations. These results exactly matched with previous paternity testing performed with di-nucleotide SSR markers. These results demonstrate the usefulness of the developed hexa-nucleotide repeated motifs for checking the paternity of breeding progenies and suggest their use on variability studies.

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