Vitis 42 (4), 185–192 (2003) Characterization of Iranian grapevine cultivars using microsatellite markers

Sixty-two grapevine (Vitis spp.) accessions from Iran and the USA were characterized at 9 highly polymorphic microsatellite loci using fluorescent primers and a capil-lary electrophoresis fragment sizing system. The number of alleles observed per locus ranged from 4 to 16 and het-erozygosity values ranged from 0.47 to 0.86. Genetic simi-larity was estimated for each pair of accessions as the pro-portion of shared alleles. A phenogram constructed from genetic dissimilarity values revealed three clusters, one each for table grapes, wine grapes and rootstocks. The phenogram also revealed three clonal sets (Askari, Bidane and Yaghoti) as well as some synonyms and homonyms among Iranian table grape cultivars. K e y w o r d s: Vitis vinifera, grape, simple sequence repeat, SSR, microsatellite