| Affiliation: | (1) Nordic Gene Bank, Box 41, SE-230 53 Alnarp, Sweden;(2) Department of Plant Biology and Forest Genetics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, P.O. Box 7080, SE-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden;(3) Department of Applied Biology, Plant Pathology, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 27, FIN-000014, Finland;(4) Present address: MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Regional Unit, North Ostrobothnia Research Station, Tutkimusasemantie 15, FI-92400 Ruukki, Finland |
| Abstract: | The management of genebank collections of cultivated potato is costly due to the need for in vitro maintenance and virus eradication. Therefore, it is important to set up conservation strategies, which prevent duplicates entering the collections. In this study, 32 Nordic potato landraces were studied for 57 morphological traits and analysed for amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). Most landraces could be distinguished based on the morphological characters, except five accessions. Using five primer combinations to generate 114 reproducible AFLPs, of which 63 (55%) were polymorphic, the five morphologically indistinguishable accessions were placed into two groups with identical AFLP patterns, suggesting that some of the accessions were redundant for long-term preservation. The AFLP data showed that the Nordic collection of potato landraces is composed of genetically different clones, and morphological analysis revealed a wide range of variability. This variability seems to be distributed randomly over the Nordic region since the cluster analysis based on AFLPs and morphological traits revealed no grouping based on the country of origin. Principal component analysis suggests that fewer morphological traits than used in this study will be sufficient to discriminate between different genotypes of cultivated potato (Solanum tuberosum L.). Future possibilities for rationalising potato collections are discussed. |
