Identification of tomato cultivars using microsatellites

Microsatellite polymorphisms can be detected both by Southern hybridization and by Polymerase Chain Reactions. This paper describes the use of both applications of microsatellites for cultivar identification in tomato. The discriminating power of microsatellite hybridisation was demonstrated on two old intogression free cultivars. The potential of the Sequence Tagged Microsatellites Sites (STMS) application for cultivar identification was investigated using eight microsatellite containing loci found in the EMBL database. Only two loci were polymorphic in a test set of five tomato cultivars. For these two loci, i,e. LELE25 and LEEFIA, a screening of 16 tomato cultivars revealed three and six length alleles, respectively.