Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry, cilt.47, sa.6, ss.1099-1114, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
The Aegean region makes a prominent contribution to Turkish viticulture. The region, which includes important grape culture centers such as Manisa, Denizli, and İzmir, has extremely favorable conditions for the cultivation of seedless grapes as well as table and wine grape varieties. In this region, which possesses rich grapevine genetic diversity together with its area and production potential, it is seen that there is variety confusion caused by different nomenclature and intravariety variations. In addition, some old grape varieties that are not used in cultivation are at risk of disappearing. In order to address these problems, the viticulture potentials of Manisa, Muğla, İzmir, Kütahya, Aydın, Denizli, Uşak, and Afyon provinces as populations were evaluated using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. In and research conducted using 15 SSR markers on 151 grape varieties including 149 native and 2 reference varieties, 3 similar (identical), 7 synonymous, and 13 homonymous cases were determined. The highest numbers of alleles were seen at the VVMD7 (14 alleles) and VVS2 (13 alleles) loci. The highest genetic similarity ratio among the genotypes was found to be 0.96 (96%) and the lowest value was 0.13 (13%). In population structure analysis, it was observed that there was significant gene flow among the Aegean region populations, while in Bayesian analysis, it was determined that the Aegean region populations (except the Aydın and İzmir populations) were highly admixed. The findings obtained in this research, which was carried out for the characterization of grape genetic resources at the SSR level on a regional scale, shed light for other genetic characterization studies. In addition, the results of this research may contribute to other viticulture activities (breeding, reproduction, variety registration, etc.) to be carried out in the region.