GERMPLASM CONSERVATION OF PERSIMMON IN EUROPE

The European persimmon collection consists basically of 160 inventoried accessions kept by three institutions from Italy and one from Spain. As a whole, these accessions represent 101 different cultivars of Diospyros kaki L.f., 1 genotype of D. lotus L. and 1 genotype of D. virginiana L., for a total of 103 different genotypes. As regards their geographic origins, 19% of the accessions are possible local varieties. Under the EC Project "Conservation, evaluation, exploitation and collection of minor fruit tree species" persimmon accessions have been inventoried and characterised, and data were input in the European Minor Fruit Tree Species Database (on-line version at http://www.unifi.it/project/ueresgen29/netdbase/db1.htm). First steps towards rationalisation of persimmon collections (i.e. accession identification, identification of duplicates, core collection definition) were undertaken. This paper illustrates the main results achieved in the context of genetic resource preservation.