Morphological characterisation of Cucurbita maxima Duchesne(Cucurbitaceae) landraces from the Po Valley (Northern Italy)

摘要

Identifying crop genetic resources represent an importantaspect of agricultural biodiversity conservation. However, conservationof landraces is challenging because they often cannot beproperly identified, or have already suffered from genetic erosion,or have disappeared. Identification of landraces can be obtainedusing molecular markers or discriminating qualitative and quantitativemorphological traits. The latter methodology is cheap andeasily achievable, allowing the registration of landraces in nationalcatalogues. In this study, we carried out a morphological characterisationof different accessions of Cucurbita maxima(Cucurbitaceae) cultivated in the Po Valley (N-Italy), locallyknown as Cappello da prete. The aim was to explore the morphologicalfruit variability among accessions and to identify potentialdistinct landraces within the Cappello da prete squash group.Differences between accessions were found indicating that morphologicaltraits can be effectively used to identify these landracesand suggesting a diversification by isolation. Indeed, our morphologicalanalysis shown the existence of two different landraces ofCappello da prete squashes. The adopted procedure can demonstratethat few low-cost traits are useful for the registration of localvarieties in the official catalogue of landraces. Our study alsodemonstrates that morphological characterisation allows a rapidand cost-effective identification of diagnostic morphological traitsthat, together with historical and cultural information, are fundamentalto recognise landraces.