Genetic stability of 'Festival' and 'Rubigem' cultivars in different subcultures by SSR markers

The cultivated strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa Duch.), a member of the Rosaceae, is the most important soft fruit worldwide. In vitro techniques are important for clonal multiplication of this species. Conventional propagation methods are slow, laborious, and expensive with many limitations. For this reason in vitro propagation offers fast multiplication rates to propagate the strawberries and recent years strawberries are propagated commercially using in vitro derived mother plants. However, sometimes, in vitro propagated plants more or less often exhibited characteristics such as dwarfism, chlorosis or white striping of leaves, multiapexing and stem fasciations, intensified vigour, hyperrunnering and abnormal flowering, accompanied by increased production of smaller fruits. Genetic stability of micropropagated plants are very important phenomena. In this study, we aimed to detect genetic stability of 'Rubygem' and 'Festival' cultivars from meristem and shoot derived explants in subcultures. We used 40 SSR primer pairs to detect polymorphism in each of 10 subcultures. We did not find any SSR polymorphism between mother plants and invitro derived plants.