Assessment of diversity in a Hungarian apple gene bank using morphological markers Ildikó Király & Márta Ladányi & Orsolya Nagyistván & Magdolna Tóth Received: 16 October 2014 /Accepted: 15 February 2015 /Published online: 28 February 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract The world’ s apple production is based on only a few dozen cultivars. In countries with an ad- vanced food culture and growing environmental aware- ness, the demand for bio fruits and products is also increasing. The proportion of organic orchards is quite low (1–2 %) in Hungary. As regards application of cultivars, there are two possible solutions. One is to introduce new resistant cultivars from the national breeding programme into cultivation. The second is to evaluate old local cultivars to decide if they could be used in modern production systems. Our general aims are to characterise the cultivars in the apple gene bank of the Corvinus University of Budapest using morpholog- ical markers and to investigate the biodiversity of the collection. Morphological and biological characterisa- tion of 56 different old cultivars was performed using the Union Internationale pour la Protection des Obtentions Végétales (UPOV) descriptions. The collec- tion exhibited great genetic diversity. The morphologi- cal similarity indexes suggest great distances between the cultivars. On the basis of hierarchical cluster analy- sis, all the cultivars differed greatly from the others with the exception of cultivars and cultivar groups which originated from bud mutations. It is currently hoped to re-register a number of old cultivars in Hungary, so information on the pomological characteristics of these cultivars will soon be of key importance. The biodiver- sity of the cultivars used by growers could be main- tained or even widened by using the old cultivars stored in the gene bank as parents during the breeding process. Old cultivars possessing exceptional value and good pest and disease resistance can also be used in organic orchards. Keywords Malus × domestica . UPOV . Local cultivars Introduction Apples are the fruit species grown in the third greatest quantity in the world after citrus fruits and bananas, but global apple production involves only a few dozen cultivars. In the case of an ecological catastrophe (e.g. appearance of new pathogen species), the restricted range of cultivars could endanger the reliability and profitability of apple production (Lespinasse et al. 2000). Nowadays, the role of local cultivars and land races in large-scale production has become completely insignificant. In Hungary, there was a special cultivar structure at 1800s. These local cultivars have unknown origin, but they are typical of their area. Old and local apple cultivars have enormous value from the point of view of biodiversity (Szani 2007; Holler 2007). A sur- vey undertaken in apple gene banks in 22 different countries have been demonstrated the number of Org. Agr. (2015) 5:143–151 DOI 10.1007/s13165-015-0100-z I. Király (*) : O. Nagyistván : M. Tóth Department of Pomology, Faculty of Horticultural Science, Corvinus University of Budapest, Villányi út 29-43., 1118 Budapest, Hungary e-mail: ildiko.kiraly@uni-corvinus.hu M. Ladányi Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Horticultural Science, Corvinus University of Budapest, Villányi út 29-43., 1118 Budapest, Hungary