LAUSR

Apple trees are perennial plant and have a characteristic of requiring long period from seed germination to flowering and fruiting. Most Korean apple cultivars are derived from closely related varieties genetically; consequently, they are distributed into grafted seedlings at juvenile stage. Therefore, it is difficult for them to distinguish by morphological traits due to the high similarities without fruit characteristics. We have integrated the high-resolution melting (HRM) analysis with simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker genotyping to identify thirteen apple cultivars originated from South Korea. The patterns of temperature-shifted melting curves were investigated from HRM analysis. The SSR loci used in this study generated a unique melting curve profile for each cultivar allowing their comparison and classification. The combination of the allelic patterns obtained with the just three SSR markers was able to identify thirteen apple cultivars. These results suggest that SSR markers used in combination with HRM analysis can be a fast and accurate method for high-throughput cultivar identification and biodiversity assessment.