FRUIT QUALITY PARAMETERS AND MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF SOME LOQUAT ACCESSIONS

Loquat (Eriobotrya japonica (Thunb.) Lindl.), one of the firstly harvested fruit in spring is important fruit for Turkey and other Mediterranean countries because it can be supplied to market during shortage of fresh fruit. Genetic diversity within the loquats comes from seeds obtained from open pollinated trees or budspots which occur very often within the genus. The objectives of this study were to determine variations for some fruit quality characters and genetic markers among 10 foreign cultivars, 3 selected local cultivars and two change seedlings. For fruit weight the largest cultivar was 'Kanro' with 46.2 g. Concordantly with its large fruits the highest fruit length and width also were measured in 'Kanro'. Seed number of accessions studied varied between 1.22 and 3.17. The highest flesh ratio was obtained from 'Baffico' (90%) whereas 'Seedling 1' had the lowest flesh ratio (75%). There were high level of variation for total soluble solids (TSS) and acidity of accessions studied. Total soluble solids (TSS) of cultivars were determined between 14.0 and 9.9%, acidity varied between 0.39 and 1.99%. Molecular analysis, as assessed with 21 randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primers indicated that all of accessions were distinguished. Using unweighted pair group method arithmetic average (UPGMA) analysis of RAPD data detected that similarity values among the loquats were between 0.69 and 0.92. In the dendrogram the accessions nested in two main groups. First group consisted of 'Hafif Cukurgobek', 'Uzun Cukurgobek', 'Tanaka' and 'Sayda' whereas rest of 11 accessions nested in other group. Wide range of genetic diversity was determined in loquat accessions and it considered as advantage for breeding programs