Efficiency of AFLP marker attributes in the genetic analysis of sweet cherry cultivars

Abstract

The use of marker attributes is a popular tool in the studies of the genetic diversity of plant species for the estimation of informativeness or discriminating ability of molecular markers. Among a variety of different marker attributes, polymorphism information content (PIC) and resolving power (RP) are the most common attributes used for the estimation of amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers. However, there is disagreement as to whether those attributes are more suitable for studies of genetic diversity of different plant species. In this study, 9 AFLP primer combinations were used for the establishment of genetic relationships among 31 sweet cherry cultivars, in order to compare the two AFLP marker attributes. The nine primer combinations produced 485 fragments, of which 350 (72%) were polymorphic. Average PIC values for each primer combination ranged from 0.30 to 0.42 and RP values varied from 11.42 to 31.74. No relationship was found between PIC and RP (r = 0.004). All sweet cherry accessions used in this study were clearly distinguished by UPGMA cluster analysis, if the most informative AFLP primer combination based on RP value was used. However, 9 sweet cherry accessions failed to be differentiated by the use of the most informative AFLP primer combination based on PIC value. In this research, we established that the RP is the best marker attribute of the informativeness of AFLP markers for the identification of cultivars compared with PIC. Furthermore, the reason for the presence or absence of the relationship between RP and PIC was revealed.