Development of KASP fingerprinting panel for clonal identification in red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.).

Red raspberry is an economically important horticultural crop that is known for its fruit's sweet flavour and nutritional value. A reliable and economic genotyping platform is needed to facilitate clonal/variety identification. Previous attempts for clonal identification utilized morphological traits or low-throughput, difficult to score dinucleotide-containing simple sequence repeat molecular markers. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), despite having lower allelic diversity, are numerous across the genome and more easily converted to high-throughput assays restoring differential power. In this study, we use the kompetitive allele-specific PCR (KASP™) chemistry, an affordable and high-throughput platform, to develop a panel of SNPs to distinguish a diverse collection of red raspberry accessions for clonal identification. The panel consists of 48 KASP assays that show high concordance with whole genome sequencing, allelic balance, and recovery rate and a minimal set of 24 assays that distinguished the same accessions differentiated by the larger panel.