Ir. J. Vromans: DNA markers give a new impulse in flax breeding.

The continuous use of modern fiber flax cultivars in breeding programs makes it more difficult to develop better and distinguishable fiber flax cultivars as compared to the existing cultivars.

The primary goal of this thesis is to investigate the inheritance of important traits in flax. Furthermore, we tried to describe the genetic structure and the amount of genetic variation present in the primary and secondary genepool of the crop. This resulted in new insights, which makes the production new fiber flax cultivars in the future possible. DNA fingerprinting is an excellent tool to characterize the genetic variation and to analyze the inheritance of traits.

DNA fingerprints shows that fiber flax has a narrow genetic base and forms a sub-population of the linseed. Wild crossable flax species but also linseed cultivars harbor more variation and could be excellent sources to enlarge the genetic basis of fiber flax.

The inheritance of some traits showed to be very simple, whereas several other traits (e.g. fiber quality) are more complex. Molecular markers can be very well used in flax breeding to follow the inheritance of traits. Therefore, marker assisted selection could be an efficient alternative or supplementary to classical phenotypic selection in flax.