Identification of grapevine rootstock cultivars using expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeats

Area of Science:

• Plant genetics
• Viticulture
• Molecular biology

Background:

• Grapevine rootstocks confer vital pest and environmental resistance to susceptible cultivars.
• Accurate identification of grapevine rootstock varieties is increasingly critical due to new breeding and selection efforts.
• Traditional DNA fingerprinting methods are impractical for routine plant cultivar identification.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a practical and reliable method for identifying grapevine rootstock cultivars.
• To utilize the manual cultivar identification diagram (MCID) strategy with EST-SSR markers for grapevine rootstock genotyping.
• To create a grapevine rootstock cultivar identification system (V-R-CID).

Main Methods:

• Employed the manual cultivar identification diagram (MCID) strategy.
• Utilized expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) markers.
• Genotyped 22 diverse grapevine rootstock cultivars.

Main Results:

• Successfully identified and distinguished all 22 grapevine rootstock cultivars.
• Developed a grapevine rootstock cultivar identification diagram (V-R-CID) using seven pairs of EST-SSR primers.
• Demonstrated that fingerprints from primer pairs can be reused, reducing the number of primers needed.

Conclusions:

• The developed V-R-CID is a practical and referable tool for grapevine rootstock identification.
• This approach offers an efficient method for distinguishing grapevine rootstock cultivars.
• The V-R-CID system can be expanded to include more cultivars for enhanced utility in the grape industry.