Comparison of nuclear DNA content of citrus rootstock populations by flow cytometry analysis

Citrus species are widely grown in the world. Plant characteristics of the rootstock populations used for orange, lemon, mandarin and grapefruit cultivars should be known as well as those of the cultivars that help true‐to‐type nursery plant production. In this study, cell nuclei were isolated from leaf tissues of seedlings of trifoliate orange, sour orange, rough lemon,‘Volkamer’ lemon,‘Cleopatra’ mandarin,‘Hyokan’, ‘Sanbokan’, ‘Kinkoje’, ‘Carrizo’ citrange and ‘Swingle’ citrumelo, and then fluorescence intensities were measured on propidium iodide‐stained nuclei by flow cytometry. Nuclei isolated from the triploid ‘Tahiti’ lime with a known nuclear genome size were used as the internal standard to estimate the nuclear DNA content of Citrus seedling populations in absolute units. Results obtained from cytograms and histograms indicated that all seedlings analyzed were diploid. In addition, differences between the species for nuclear DNA content were also found to be significant. ‘Hyokan’ seedlings had the biggest genome size, 0.984 pg/2C, whereas trifoliate orange seedlings had the smallest genome size, 0.678 pg/2C. Flow cytometry analysis could be used for obtaining accurate and rapid results for cytological observations of seedling populations of Citrus.