Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Colletotrichum acutatum is responsible for strawberry anthracnose, one of the main disease of cultivated strawberry in the south-western area of France (60% of the French production). Anthracnose is a polycyclic disease for which no efficient disease control method has been developed. Therefore, the development of cultivars with sustainable resistance, i.e. efficient against the two pathogenicity groups, may be promising to lower both the level of damage and the use of chemicals. The objective of this study is to identify molecular markers linked to the major dominant gene conferring resistance to pathogenicity group 2 by using an approach of Bulk Segregant Analysis (BSA) and Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphisin (AFLP) markers. We identified four molecular markers, named mf1 to mf4, linked to the resistance gene to the pathogenicity group 2 of C. acutatum. Within a segregating population (back cross type) for the dominant gene, no recombination between the resistance allele and the marker mf3 was detected in 78 BC1 individuals studied. One Sequence Characterized Amplified Region (SCAR) obtained from mf4 (SCAR-mf4) provided a fast and easy test for selection of anthracnose resistant plants at early stage, with a misidentification rate of 1.3%. The evaluation of this SCAR marker in few strawberry varieties showed that only some resistant varieties possessed this marker.