SUMMARY
The intensive renewal of grapevine plantations, implementation of EU regulations and reshaping of national viticulture and wine industries that take place at present in Romania require application of efficient methods for the accurate cultivars identification. The aim of this study is to identify and discriminate eleven native Romanian grapevine varieties with the goal to obtain a genotype-specific profile by using microsatellites, the undisputed markers of choice for grape identification and parentage analysis (Sefc et al. 2001). All the primers paires yielded clear and scorable amplified products and proved to be multi-allelic. The total number of different alleles per locus ranged from 4 (in VVMD24 and VVIQ52) to 10 (in VMC8G9, UDV125and VMC5G6.1) with a total of 87 alleles considering all loci and a mean value of 7.9 alleles per locus. The microsatellite profile of the investigated cultivars showed a high level of genetic diversity among their flanking regions and all cultivars were found to have an unique allelic profile. The number of alleles detected with Romanian grapevine genotipes was very similar to those obtained with SSR microsatellites on European cultivars (Sefc et al., 2000). The expected heterozygosity (gene diversity) values were high for all DNA samples ranging from 0.60 at locus VVMD24 to 0.88 at locus VVMD28. The observed heterozygosity varied between 0.63 at locus VVMD24 to 1 at locus VVMD28 and was higher than the expected one at 6 out of 11 loci. All data obtained in this study provide valuable genetic information, especially in the absence of comprehensive studies on the Romanian grape cultivars. SSR markers proved to be powerful tool and very efficient for cultivar identification and analysis of their genetic structure. Genetic characterization of a larger number of authochtonous cultivars is the first step before to start further investigation to verify the homonymous and synonymous among Romanian cultivars and to reveal the genetic relationship between national and European grapevine germplasm.