MORPHOLOGICAL AND BIOCHEMICAL VARIABILITY IN DIFFERENT POPULATIONS OF WILD SWEET CHERRY (PRUNUS AVIUM L.)

Three autochthonous populations of wild sweet cherry (P. avium L.) have been collected from Southwest Serbia. Biochemical and morphological variability in these populations were analyzed. Observed zymograms for five enzyme systems did not show patterns different from sweet cherry cultivars already analyzed. The discrimination effect of eight characters was examined with multivariate analysis. The results of classification obtained according to the linear discriminant functions express a very slight difference between the real and evaluated groups. For effective discrimination, these eight characters can be reduced to only five with more than 90% reliability. These five characters are: fruit maturity, juice colour, tree habit, yield and seed germination.