Identification of the Paternal Parent of ‘Bing’ Sweet Cherry and Confirmation of Descendants Using Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Markers

Abstract

‘Bing’ is an iconic sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivar in the United States that even after more than 130 years of cultivation remains the most highly regarded dark sweet cherry and is the standard by which new sweet cherries are judged. ‘Bing’ has been repeatedly used as a parent in North American breeding programs and is found in the lineages of several important modern cultivars. The maternal parent of ‘Bing’ is reported to be ‘Black Republican’, an old cultivar commercially grown for fruit in the Willamette Valley, OR, after ≈1860 and now is usually only grown as a pollenizer cultivar; however, the paternal parent of ‘Bing’ is unknown. The objective of this study was to deduce the paternal parent of ‘Bing’ and validate the pedigree records for the relatives of ‘Bing’ using statistical algorithms that use genomewide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. With a high probability, it was determined that the sweet cherry cultivar Napoleon, also known as Royal Ann in the Pacific northwestern United States, a large, firm, blush-type, light-fleshed, and productive cherry, is the paternal parent of ‘Bing’. This parentage deduction results in an increase in the known relatedness among U.S. cultivated sweet cherry breeding germplasm because ‘Napoleon’ is an important founder previously known to be present in the ancestry of every self-compatible sweet cherry cultivar bred to date, directly and through ‘Bing’ and its descendants.