Poster: Reproductive development

Abs # 363: Paternity analysis of ^,Hass^, avocado fruits using microsatellite molecular markers

Presenter:	Ying, Zhentu , zying@ifas.ufl.edu
Authors	Ying, Zhentu  (A)   Davenport, Thomas L (A)   Schnell, Ray J (B)   Olano, C T (B)
Affiliations:	(A): Univ. of Florida, IFAS, Tropical Research and Education Center (B): National Germplasm Repository, USDA-ARS

Hass is the most popular avocado (Persea Americana Mill) cultivar in the world. It accounts for about 85 percent of the total avocado production in California, but its best pollinizing cultivars have not been determined. Using fourteen microsatellite markers, we genotyped the ten most common pollinizing cultivars that were interplanted in a ^,Hass^, orchard near Oxnard, California, including ^,Bacon^,, ^,Ettinger^,, ^,Fuerte^,, ^,Harvest^,, ^,Hass^,, ^,Lamb Hass^,, ^,Marvel^,, ^,Nobel^,, ^,SirPrize^, and ^,Zutano^,. Eleven of the fourteen markers performed extremely well and produced a total of 59 informative alleles with an average of 5.4 alleles per marker. Use of four out of the eleven markers was sufficient to determine the paternity of ^,Hass^, fruits sampled from the above orchard. Preliminarily results evaluating 182 ^,Hass^, fruits showed that ^,Zutano^, was the best cross pollinizer followed by ^,Ettinger^,. Self and close pollination of ^,Hass^, was the third most prevalent source.