Development of a core collection of strawberry cultivars based on SSR and CAPS marker polymorphisms

Abstract

A strawberry core collection was established based on simple sequence repeat and cleavage amplified polymorphic sequence marker polymorphisms in 119 strawberry cultivars using the “PowerCore” program. The core collection consisted of 19 cultivars. The correlation coefficients for the diversity index were significant between the core collection cultivars and all cultivars. Allele frequencies of each marker allele were not significantly different between the core collection cultivars and all cultivars according to Fisher’s exact test. Cluster analysis indicated that the selected core collection cultivars evenly distributed throughout the multiple clusters and principle component analysis clearly showed major principle components of core collection cultivars distributed widely among those of all cultivars. Furthermore, core collection cultivars tended to harbor minor alleles. These results demonstrated that the core collection cultivars were suitably selected in terms of reflecting the genetic diversity of all strawberry cultivars.