Resumen de Biotechnological tools applied to the improvement of persimmon (diospyros kaki thunb) culture
Persimmon culture has vastly grown in the last 20 years as an alternative to citrus production in the Valencian region. However, its production faces three important problems. First, monovarietal production based on Rojo Brillante is a sanitary and market risk that requires to increase the number of varieties available. Second, climate change has threatened persimmon production in the Mediterranean areas because the salinity increase in water and soil. Salinity severely affects production, quality and postharvest life of the fruit. The lack of salt-tolerant rootstocks compatible with the cultural conditions aggravates the problem; hence clonal salt-tolerant rootstocks are needed. Third, persimmon industry relies on the postharvest deastringency treatment of the varieties. Even though there are varieties that are naturally non-astringent, its culture in the Mediterranean area is limited due to rootstock incompatibility. Additionally, the costly postharvest treatment is also affected by salinity. Consequently, more information is needed about the molecular mechanism of astringency biosynthesis in persimmon fruit in order to develop new varieties and/or more effective treatments for removing astringency of the fruit.
In the context of breeding and molecular biology, three goals need to be approached in order to improve the cultural conditions: development of new persimmon varieties with maturity date different from Rojo Brillante, development of salt-tolerant clonal rootstocks compatible with non-astringent varieties and research on the molecular bases of the mechanism of astringency production to optimize the postharvest treatments. This research contributes and provides knowledge to address these goals.
Concerning breeding of new varieties, the IVIA persimmon germplasm collection is an important resource for breeding of new varieties. To ensure efficient breeding and avoid redundancy in the collection, a SSR analysis was carried out to solve this problem. This analysis has provided useful data, such as the discovery of unique alleles, that allows rapid identification of varieties or the division of the population according to its astringency type, confirming the common genetic background of the accessions concerning to this trait. The generated genetic diversity map will be useful for designing crosses in the breeding program.
