HORTICULTURAL STUDIES AND GENETIC RELATIONSHIP VIA DNA FINGERPRINTING USING RAPD MARKERS BETWEEN SEWI DATE PALM AND TWO SUPERIOR SEEDED FEMALES

Two seeded female date palms namely Qina1 and Qina 2 were selected and compared with Sewi cultivar concerning vegetative traits, fruit retention, fruit set, yield and fruit properties.Since the two unknown seeded date palms under investigation have superior morphological fruit characteristics also physical or chemical ones. The obtained results revealed that, Qina 2 registered the highest value of vegetative parameters such as girth of trunk, leaf length, leaflet length and number of leaflets, alsoshowed the highest value of fruit set (80.6 and 81%), bunch weight (15.3 and 16.2kg) and yield/ palm (153 and 162 kg/palm) in the both seasons, respectively. Qina 2 recorded the highest values of TSS (27 and 27.8%), reducing sugars (41 and 42%) and non-reducing sugars (13.6 and 13.8%) in the two seasons, respectively. The molecular level, were hired 9 primers for RAPD technique. These primers had a total of 54 different alleles for three genotypes. The maximum Polymorphic Information Content value and polymorphism percentage that discovered by OPA-04, OPA-07 and OPO-13 markers exposed a high score of 7 bands with polymorphism. Primers OPA-02, OPB-14 and OPO-19 manifested minimum level from bands (5 bands) with 60%. These results revealed that Qina2 considered as a superior with high yield with good fruit and good genetic marker properties when compared with Sewi commercial cultivar.