European chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) originated in Eastern Europe and is now
valued for its timber and edible nuts throughout Europe. This study aims to assess
genetic variation in natural and managed populations of C. sativa in mainland Europe
and the UK.
Six microsatellite-enriched libraries for C. saliva were successfully developed. Twentytwo
sets of microsatellite-flanking primers were designed of which five were optimised
and tested on 34 C. sativa samples. The number of alleles varied from three (EMCs42)
to 14 (EMCs38) per locus.
Six microsatellite loci primers (EMCs4, EMCs15, EMCs25 and EMCs38 (Buck et al.
2003) and CsCAT4 and CsCAT6 (Marinoni et al. 2003)) were selected, from those
available, to screen six English and 21 populations from Spain, France, Italy and
Greece. Sixty-six alleles were identified in English populations and 77 alleles in the
mainland European populations. Significant homozygosity was observed at the
EMCs25 locus, likely due to null alleles present at this locus. Data from this locus were
consequently removed from the statistical analysis. Estimates of FsT (0) were 0.019 for
the English populations, and 0.197, 0.170 and 0.3 72 for the mainland European natural,
coppice and orchard populations, respectively. There were significant differences
between mainland European orchard and natural (p:S0.05), and orchard and coppice
(p:S0.05) populations for allelic richness and estimates of FsT- No significant
differences were found between coppice and natural populations. No significant
correlation between pair-wise FsT and geographic distance in the English populations
was found. A significant correlation was found between pair-wise estimate of FsT and
geographic distance for the mainland European populations (R2=0.0621 , p:S0.005). It is
likely that the English populations originated from French material, with independent
imports from Spain and Italy. The relatively high diversity in the English populations
may be due to multiple imports from different regions in Europe to England.