A preliminary characterization of Saffron germplasm from the CROCUSBANK collection.

A limited genetic variation is suspected for the saffron crop due to its sterile condition and the characteristics of the production system, which makes difficult the conservation of the mutations that may arise spontaneously. Therefore very little effort has been devoted to determine this issue. In addition, the loss of land surface dedicated to the saffron crop in most European countries has been dramatic, which may have resulted in a significant genetic erosion of this crop. Actions to stop and reverse this situation at global level have been initiated with the support of the European Commission (Action 018 AGRI GEN RES 870/2004 - CROCUSBANK), in order to create, characterise and exploit a world germplasm collection of Crocus species. In this paper, we present a preliminary characterisation of 50 saffron accessions from Azerbaijan, France, India, Iran, Italy, Morocco, New Zealand, Spain and Turkey. We have measured characters related to phenology (date of sprouting and flowering, duration of flowering), floral morphology (length and width of tepals, and length of stamen filaments and anthers) and saffron production (percentage of flowering corms, n° of flowers per corm, saffron spice weight per flower). Stamen filament length was the only measured character identical in all the accessions. In the other characters there were significant differences, with the proportion of the total variance due to differences among accessions ranging from 53% for the duration of the flowering period, to 24% for the number of flowers per corm. In some characters, like number of flowering corms or time to flowering, a part of the observed variation was due to small differences in the initial weight of the mother corms. The variation in other characters like dry saffron weight per flower or the duration of the flowering period were independent on this factor, and the observed variation could be of interest for selection and breeding. Preliminary DNA characterisation on 25 accessions has also been performed using PCR-based molecular markers (AFLP and SNPs).