SSR-based identification key of cultivars of Olea europaea L. diffused in Southern-Italy

Olive (Olea europaea L.) is an important fruit species in Italy and Mediterranean basin constituted by a wide germplasm with a large number of cultivars present in all the Mediterranean area. SSRs are becoming the markers of choice for variability studies in olives as they are simple to perform, transferable, hypervariable, highly polymorphic and show a high information content. Olive genetic diversity was studied using 16 SSR markers on 30 cultivars diffused in Southern-Italy. Resolving Power (RP) and Power of Discrimination (PD) were calculated to evaluate the efficiency of the SSR markers investigated in studies of cultivars fingerprinting. Based on their high efficiency, two SSR markers, UDO43 and DCA16 were chosen to set up an identification key to distinguish the entire set of cultivars, confirming the high biodiversity of the Southern-Italian olive germplasm and the suitability of SSR markers in studies of cultivar diagnosis.