The 2012 ASHS Annual Conference

Aronia Medik., commonly known as chokeberry, is a genus of deciduous, multi-stemmed, rosaceous shrubs native to eastern North America.  Three species of chokeberry are commonly accepted, A. arbutifolia (L.) Pers., red chokeberry, A. melanocarpa (Michx.) Elliott, black chokeberry, and A. prunifolia (Marshall) Rehder, or purple chokeberry.  In Europe, a fourth species of human origin is recognized as Aronia mitschurinii A.K.Skvortsov & Maitul.  In North America this type of Aronia is represented as cultivars of A. melanocarpa, including ‘Viking’, ‘Nero’, and ‘Aron’.  This species is characterized by near homogeneity in seedling progeny, tetraploidy, and a distinct morphology. In comparison to A. melanocarpa, A. mitschurinii types have thicker diameter stems, a less suckering habit, wider leaf blades and larger fruits.  It has been proposed that this genotype originated from Russian pomologist Ivan Michurin’s early 20^th century experiments involving Aronia × Sorbus hybridization.  In this study we utilized amplified fragment length polymorphic (AFLP) markers to elucidate the relationships of A. mitschurinii to wild North American Aronia, ×Sorbaronia C.K. Schneid and seven genera from subtribe Pyrinae (Rosaceae).  Data from seven primer combinations was interpreted by the NTSYSpc software package into a similarity matrix using Jaccard’s coefficient.  Clustering of AFLP data similarity data using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) identified A. mitschurinii as distinct from wild Aronia, grouping it most closely with ×Sorbaronia fallax and ×Sorbaronia ‘Ivan’s Beauty’.  Non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) also demonstrated a relationship between A. mitschurinii, ×Sorbaronia fallax, and Sorbus L.