Ampelographic characterization of white grapevine cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.) grown in Palestine

Abstract

In Palestine, grape culture consists of ecotypes and cultivars (also called local varieties), for which a large number of homonymous and synonymous designations exist as well as misnaming of cultivars. The present study is the first report using detailed ampelographic characterizations (39 informative traits) to assess genetic diversity and detect similarities among sixteen accessions collected from putative diverse grape genotypes In general, 30 descriptors presented highly and satisfactory divergent genotypes, whereas the remaining traits showed no or very little ampelographic variation. Based on the similarity matrix and the resulting dendrogram of these ampelographic data, distinguishable genotypes as well as some cases of synonymies and homonymies clearly exist. A synonymy case seemed to be in four genotypes including Jandali-Mfarad, Jan-dali-Mrazraz, Jandali, and Hamadani-Mattar, which indeed showed genetic distances of less than 0.5, sug-gesting their relatedness, and the possibility that they are the same genotype, but with different names. In addition, homonym cases also occur in the following pairs of “Marawi’s, Hamadani’s, and Zaini’s genotypes, in which each pair seems to be two distinctive genotypes. Finally, among the 16 examined genotypes, the Zaini-Baladi genotype tended to show the highest genetic distance values from the others and thus could be potentially incorporated into any further local or regional breeding programs as well as germplasm conservation.