Article ID: OKD-104
We investigated the resistance to stem blight disease (Phomopsis asparagi (Sacc.)) in the progeny of two combinations of interspecific crosses between Asparagus officinalis (sensitive) and Asparagus A. kiusianus (resistant) in an effort to produce resistant cultivars. The progeny showed different degrees of disease severity, depending on the combination of crosses. Most of the hybrids derived from AO0060 (A. officinalis) × AK0501 (A. kiusianus) showed high disease resistance comparable to that of A. kiusianus. The results indicate that disease resistance could be introduced from A. kiusianus into A. officinalis, and that the selection of an appropriate cross combination is important for the production of disease-resistant cultivars. We analyzed the parents and hybrids of reciprocal crosses between A. officinalis and A. kiusianus using derived cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence markers to investigate the inheritance of the chloroplast genome, whose inheritance and genetic characteristics are not yet known. The chloroplast DNAs were inherited from the maternal parent, indicating that no major genes related to stem blight resistance were found in the chloroplast DNA.
