Wentao Sheng¹ , Tonglin Zhang¹ , Quan Kuang¹ , Zhangfeng Wang¹ , Shaochun Luo²

1 Department of Biotechnology, Nanchang Normal University, Nanchang, 330032, China
2 Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, Jiangxi, Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Nanchang, 330200, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 26   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2021.12.0026
Received: 15 Sep., 2021    Accepted: 25 Sep., 2021    Published: 10 Oct., 2021

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sheng W.T., Zhang T.L., Kuang Q., Wang Z.F., and Luo S.C., 2021, Research on the progress of systematic taxonomy in the genus Asparagus of China, Molecular Plant Breeding, 12(26): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2021.12.0026)

Garden asparagus (Asparagus officinalis L.) is a kind of nutritious and healthy vegetable with important economic value in the world. China has become the largest production country of garden asparagus in the world. But the seeds mainly depend on import, so we need to innovate breeding system and improve the international competitiveness of domestic asparagus varieties. Genetic analysis demonstrated that the genetic variation of garden asparagus was low and its heterosis was weak among cultivars. Inter-specific hybridization is an important means to utilize heterosis, but the relationship between the classical taxonomy and molecular phylogeny of the genus Asparagus is disordered, which limits the development of interspecific hybridization breeding. In this genus, thirty-one species have been found in China, which is an effective genetic resource for the utilization of heterosis among Asparagus species. In order to provide reference for the next step to clarify the phylogenetic relationship of this genus and to carry out the interspecific hybrid breeding of garden asparagus in the near future, the research progress of its classical and molecular phylogeny of this genus is reviewed in this study.

Asparagus officinalis L.; Asparagus; Phylogeny; Inter-species hybridization