University of the Philippines, Diliman Los Banos, Laguna, Philippines
Body of Abstract: Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa Duchesne ex Rozier) is an economically important fruit crop grown commercially worldwide due to its known nutritional value. The demand for strawberries in the Philippines has been increasing but varietal development is slow due to the lack of genetic information on locally available germplasm. In addition, molecular marker resources for strawberries are limited. Here, we developed Simple Sequence Repeats (SSR) markers to characterize strawberries cultivated in tropical environments, particularly in the Philippines. A total of 219,239 SSR markers were generated in silico , from which 160,025 unique markers were identified. A subset of 70 markers was used in validating representative strawberry cultivars from the core collection. All 70 markers produced successful amplicons from all the genotypes, but only 68 markers displayed polymorphism. Genetic similarities among the accessions were calculated based on UPGMA and a dendrogram was generated which categorized the strawberry accessions into 3 groups. The grouping clearly showed the separation of F. vesca which is a diploid cultivar from the F. x anannasa cultivars which is octoploid. Furthermore, Groups 2 and 3 contained accessions from different geographical origins (US, Japan, and South America). The collection of markers developed will significantly expand the genetic marker resource and would serve as a practical molecular tool for cultivar verification, assessment of genetic diversity, and marker-assisted breeding