Abstract
Jaboticaba, belonging to Myrtaceae family, has been a minor tropical fruit tree in Japan and three cultivars, ‘Sabará’, ‘Açu’ and ‘Miúda’, have been distributed. The cultivars are clearly distinguished by their bearing habits and traits of fruits. As Jaboticaba has polyembryony, it is possible to propagate the cultivars in large amounts if techniques selecting seedlings that generated from apomictic embryos exist. This research aims to develop simple sequence repeat (SSR) and morphological markers. Over 50,000 SSRs in the genome extracted from ‘Sabará’ were cataloged using the microsatellite capture sequencing technique, and one SSR primer set was developed for the identification of the three cultivars. Each unique fragment for ‘Açu’ and ‘Miúda’ in the PCR products may be non-specific fragment such as due to ascribed by different genotypes or homologues in flanking SSR region, but then the primer set indicated high robustness because of profiling consistently within and among cultivars. The three jaboticaba cultivars can be also classified by morphological traits of the leaf. ‘Sabará’ has significantly larger leaflets, which have uneven surface and come out from the rachis downwards, than other two cultivars. The size of leaflet is not different significantly between ‘Açu’ and ‘Miúda’, but their leaflet color at young stage differs clearly. The former is green, and the latter cultivar is red. These morphological traits would be influenced by ambient environments but these are practical to classify the three jaboticaba cultivars at the juvenile phase.
