Reconstruction of Parental SSR Haplotypes from a Single Grape Seed

Microsatellite (‘single sequence repeats’, SSR) markers were widely used in the last decade for the identification of parents of a given grapevine variety or for pedigree reconstruction as well. By now the pedigree of the majority of the most important varieties is established. At the same time, knowing both of the parents gives information about which one was the mother plant and which one was the pollinator. Analyses of archaeological grapevine seeds can give new opportunities in the research of the evolution of varieties. In most of the angiosperms, the endosperm is triploid with two genome equivalents from the maternal line and one from the paternal line. Our presumption was that this numeral difference in the maternal and paternal alleles causes measureable difference in the amplification of SSR alleles from grapevine seeds. To validate our method, pre-experiments were carried out on 12 ‘Pinot gris’ seeds, which verified our theory.