SUMMARY. The study was aimed at assessing the efficiency of SSR markers for the identification and differentiation of hazelnut varieties of Ukrainian breeding. The studied material included 30 samples of Corylus spp., comprising 25 hazelnut cultivars and three Corylus species from the collection of the National Dendrological Park «Sofiyivka» of the NAS of Ukraine. The polymorphism and informativeness parameters of nine microsatellite (SSR) loci were analyzed. All loci were found to be polymorphic, with the number of alleles per locus ranging from four to seven. The informativeness indic-es were as follows: polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 0.337 to 0.60 (mean 0.617); expected heterozygosity (He) ranged from 0.367 to 0.791; observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranged from 0.240 to 0.920. The results indicate the high efficiency of the analyzed SSR loci as molecular markers for the identification and differentiation of Ukrainian hazelnut cultivars, and their potential use in breeding programs.
Keywords: Corylus spp., hazelnut, cultivars, breeding, microsatellite markers
