Molecular Markers

Molecular markers have proved to be valuable tools in the characterisation and evaluation of genetic diversity within and between species and populations. Multilocus fingerprinting methods based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) have been extensively used to study relationships between varieties and cultivars of many different plant species.

In ornamental production the turnover of new varieties is rapid and their marketing of high economical interest. Legislation provides legal intellectual property rights protection to developers of new varieties of plants. It is, however, not always easy for the owner to prove the identity of his varieties to be the protected variety owned by himself. At present this is mainly done by comparison of phenotypical traits which may, however, lead to conflicting results. There is thus an urgent need for a reliable unbiased method for the identification of varieties. The development of molecular markers enabling the detection of DNA polymorphism may be the method of choice

Osteospermum "Lemon Symphony"	Osteospermum "Orange Symphony"

AlPlanta focuses on the development of AFLP markers, because their development does not require pre-existing DNA sequence information. Genomic microsatellites or single sequence repeats (SSR) are a relatively new class of DNA markers of short runs of tandemly repeated sequence motifs evenly distributed throughout eucaryotic genomes. Due to the high rate of variation in the number of repeat units, the polymorphism level shown by SSRs is high. Employing this technique we developed microsatellite markers for the identification of Osteospermum hybrids.

Projects

• AFLP Markers
• Microsatellite Markers (SSR)

Publications

Group members





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