Author(s)

Chaoren Nie¹, Xiaoguo Xu², Xiaoqin Zhang¹, Hongbing Sun¹, Jingya Yu¹, Wensheng Xia^1*

¹Wuhan Institute of Landscape Architecture, Wuhan, China.
²Wuhan Landscape Ecology Group Co., Ltd., Wuhan, China.

Studying on the genetic diversity and genetic relationship of flowering cherry cultivars is extremely important for germplasm conservation, cultivar identification and breeding. Flowering cherry is widely cultivated as an important woody ornamental plant in worldwide, especially Japan, China. However, owning to the morphological similarity, many cultivars are distinguished hardly in non-flowering season. Here, we evaluated the genetic diversity and genetic relationship of 40 flowering cherry cultivars, which are mainly cultivated in China. We selected 13 polymorphicprimers to amplify to allele fragments with fluorescent-labeled capillary electrophoresis technology. The population structure analysis results show that these cultivars could be divided into 4 subpopulations. At the population level, N_a and N_e were 6.062, 4.326, respectively. H_o and H_e were 0.458 and 0.670, respectively. The Shannon’s information index (I) was 1.417. The Pop3, which originated from P. serrulata, had the highest H_o, H_e, and I among the 4 subpopulations. AMOVA showed that only 4% of genetic variation came from populations, the 39% variation came from individuals and 57% (p < 0.05) came from intra-individuals. 5 polymorphic SSR primers were selected to construct molecular ID code system of these cultivars. This analysis on the genetic diversity and relationship of the 40 flowering cherry cultivars will help to insight into the genetic background, relationship of these flowering cherry cultivars and promote to identify similar cultivars.

Flowering Cherry, SSR, Genetic Relationship, Molecular ID, Identifying Cultivars

Nie, C. , Xu, X. , Zhang, X. , Sun, H. , Yu, J. and Xia, W. (2024) Analysis on Genetic Diversity of 40 Flowering Cherry Cultivars and Construction of Molecular ID Based on SSR Markers. Agricultural Sciences, 15, 256-273. doi: 10.4236/as.2024.152015.