Blue honeysuckle due to the high health benefits of its fruit, early ripening (before the first strawberries cultivars) and high frost resistance of both plants and flowers has gained the great popularity both in cultivation and breeding. The implementation of the breeding program of new cultivars requires the knowledge of the characteristics that determine its direction in the selected material. Therefore, in this study the evaluation of the phenological phases, yield, fruit weight, number of seeds per fruit and pollen viability in the cultivars and breeding clones of this species was made. The tested cultivars and clones had different levels of the analysed qualities except the pollen viability which was high but did not differ significantly within the genotypes. The evaluation of such characteristics as yield potential and fruit weight indicates that cultivars ‘Warszawa’, ‘Wojtek’ and T2 clone which had higher values of these characteristics as compared to other genotypes are possible to be used in breeding programme. Obtainment of the forms with early fruit ripening can be realised through the use of the selected Russian cultivars. The objective of this study was also to characterise the blue honeysuckle germplasms using RAPD markers and to assess their genetic similarity. The analysed primers produced 61 fragments out of which 57 (93.44%) were polymorphic. The genetic similarity matrix was made on the basis of RAPD markers. The mean genetic similarity was calculated at 0.56. The presented study confirms that the use of RAPD markers is a practical and effective method to evaluate the genetic similarity of blue honeysuckle genotypes and to establish genetic relationships between these genotypes.

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