2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Muscadine grapes, Vitis rotundifolia, are native to North America and became commercial in the middle of 18^th century. Breeding programs have produced large collections of V. rotundifolia cultivars and hybrids with other related species. Muscadine germplasm is currently documented through the use of breeding records and examination of morphological traits, which can be both unauthentic and equivocal. In this study, 190 individuals (180 V. rotundofolia and 10 V. vinifera) were examined with 10 pairs of simple sequence repeat (SSR) primers. A total number of 138 alleles were amplified in the 190 individuals. The number of effective alleles for each SSR marker was on average 5.19, ranging from 2.35 to 11.16. The SSR profile was used to identify the true-to-type cultivar by estimating pairwise similarity of individuals with the same name as well as by comparing shared alleles of parents and progeny. A total of 75 true-to-type cultivars were identified and homonyms were found exist in 12 cultivars. In addition, unique barcodes for molecular identity cards for the true-to-type cultivars were established using the fingerprints from those SSR markers. Each muscadine cultivar will have a unique barcode identity card, which can make it much easier for growers to identify muscadine cultivars in the future.