Identification, distinctness and registration of commercial and native grape cultivars of Iran

Protection and the prevention of illegal departures national grape germplasm, as one of the most important assets of the country, requires identification of the commercial and native cultivars and registered them in the international centers. The present project was conducted in order to registration the most important grape cultivars of Iran based on morphological and physiological traits in the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV).This research was run in Qazvin and West Azerbaijan provinces on cultivar of Fakhri, Pykamy, Khvshnav, RishBaba Sefid, RishBaba Ghermez, Sefid Bidaneh, Shahrodi, Shast Arous, Yaghoti, Askari, Ghermez Bidaneh and Mish Pestan. Fifty traits were measured based on Guidelines for the conduct of tests for Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) in grapes cultivars during two years. Results showed application of quantitative or qualitative traits was unable to distinguish from together all the grape varieties studied. But the combination of some qualitative and quantitative properties as the key attributes yielded the full performance in distinguishing varieties. As cultivars were completely distinguished, only with application of rates of eleven qualitative and quantitative traits such as number of consecutive tendrils, shape of blade, profile in cross section, number of lobes, shape of teeth, ripening, seed formation (as a plant code) or presentation of four characters, including fruit color, seed formation, profile in cross section and tendril length. On this basis, can be stated that registration of qualitative and quantitative traits is the best practice to distinguish grape varieties from each other and perhaps, does not require to measurements genetic fingerprinting in except of certain cases.