Delegates from eleven countries attended a workshop hosted by East Malling Research (EMR) on December 7-8 for the European Collaborative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources (ECPGR).

The meeting aimed to reach European-wide consensus on the use of DNA markers called microsatellites to fingerprint and characterise fruit collections effectively. East Malling Research is taking the lead in helping to standardise this technology for use with fruits including apple, pear and cherry as well as peach, almond and apricot.

Laboratories around Europe use different microsatellites and different methods for fingerprinting the fruit varieties in their collections making comparisons of results between laboratories extremely difficult. Delegates at the workshop discussed and made recommendations for reference cultivars and scoring systems and other technical aspects such as primer sets, labelling and spreadsheet uniformity.

By verifying collections with the same set of microsatellites, this technology could be used to detect varieties that have been duplicated or incorrectly named in collections. Having a verified reference collection would be useful to breeders and to nurseries to aid trueness-to-type, providing an invaluable resource in disputes over propagation material mix-ups. It is proposed that there would be a central database held by the European Crop Databases which is freely accessible. This is of particular interest to organisations such as ECPGR, which is ultimately interested in the conservation of fruit and other plants for use in research and breeding.

Whilst the technology is not new, this co-ordination of application is being driven forward and led by fruit research organisations such EMR. The same principles could be applied to other crops such as woody ornamentals and potatoes.

As the microsatellites and reference cultivars chosen in this European project include some used by collections in the US, this could make them useful for application in laboratories world-wide, particularly for apple and pear.

The workshop was organised by EMR’s Kate Evans and Ken Tobutt, who is also chair of the ECPGR fruit network and prunus working group.

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