Applicability of molecular markers in the context of protection of new varieties of cucumber

The growing number of candidate varieties presented every year at each national Plant Variety Protection Office and their decreasing genetic variability forces strategies to be adopted that will reduce costs without losing rigour when deciding about the acceptance or rejection of a candidate variety. Molecular markers have been envisaged as a reliable tool to establish differences, but can molecular markers be used for assessing distinctness? A comparison between a molecular and a morphological characterization of 41 seed samples belonging to 36 cucumber varieties and including several external controls has been carried out to investigate the applicability of molecular markers in the context of distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS) tests and the protection of new varieties. Both types of character indicate the same relationships among main groups, Dutch and Beth-Alpha types, and Gerking and Slice types, the correlation between distance matrices being only 0.6489. Varieties considered uniform for morphological traits proved not to be so for molecular markers. Therefore, molecular characterization is not offering the same estimates of uniformity and relatedness between varieties as does morphological characterization. External controls were used to establish distinction limits with morphological and molecular dendrograms to focus on those varieties, which were suspiciously similar. The results with cucumber show that molecular identity could be used to assess any lack of distinctness and so corroborate the morphological assessment of candidate varieties. The morphological trait 'type' provides distinct characterization of varieties and the molecular characterization of candidate varieties could be used to design better field experiments to assess distinction within each group of morphological cucumber type.