Abstract
Morphometric descriptors and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers were used for the classification of acerola cultivars ‘Okinawa Sweet’ and ‘Kagoshima Sweet’ grown in Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefecture, respectively by comparison with seven cultivars introduced from Hawaii into the germplasm bank of Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) . Even though cultivar identification could not be achieved by using morphometric descriptors, all the genotypes were classified according to RAPD-based DNA analysis using 57 RAPD markers amplified by 24 primers. Genetic similarities between all the pairwise combinations of cultivars were calculated using Jaccard's coefficient, which ranged between 0.00 to 1.00 with a mean value of 0.304, and 0.077 to 0.967 with a mean value of 0.406 for the morphometric descriptors and RAPD markers, respectively. RAPD similarity coefficients were correlated with morphometric similarity coefficients (r=0.578, p<0.01) . The relative position of different cultivars in a RAPD-based dendrogram was partly similar to that in a dendrogram between morphometric descriptors. The RAPD-based dendrograms revealed that the 9 cultivars could be classified into two groups. Four cultivars namely, ‘Hawaiian Queen’, ‘Manoa Sweet’, ‘Kagoshima Sweet’, and ‘Okinawa Sweet’, were clustered very closely, indicating the presence of a narrow genetic variability among them, based on both marker types.
