Microsatellites in Malus X domestica (apple): abundance, polymorphism and cultivar identification

Screening of an apple genomic library with (GA)15 and (GT)15 probes demonstrated that these repeats are abundant, occurring about every 120 and 190 kb, respectively. Microsatellites isolated from a small insert library enriched for (GA) repeats contained numbers of repeats ranging from 7 to 39. Primers to these microsatellite loci were able to direct the amplification of the repeats in 21 different cultivars. The majority of markers were highly polymorphic, diploid, and showed simple Mendelian inheritance, although about 25% of markers generated complex banding patterns consistent with the amplification of more than one locus. As few as three microsatellite markers were sufficient to differentiate between all 21 cultivars. Received: 20 February 1996 / Accepted: 24 May 1996