Mode of pollen spread in clonal seed orchard of Pinus koraiensis

The patterns of effective pollen dispersal and the relationships between pollen dispersal and genetic composition in Pinus koraiensis are still unclear. Hence, we investigated the mode of pollen dispersal of P. koraiensis in a clonal seed orchard in Lushuihe Forestry Bureau, Jilin Province, using SSR molecular markers tech-nique and the method of maximum likelihood. A total of 13 pairs of nuclear microsatellites po-lymorphic primers were used in the paternity analysis. We analyzed 100 progenies and 150 paternities. A total of 56 alleles were detected in 13 loci with 3-6 alleles (4.3 alleles in average) in a single locus. The primers of SsrPt_ctg7170 and SsrPt_ctg5333 had the maximum (6) and the minimum (3) alleles, respectively. The averaged values of observed heterozygosity, expected heterozygosity and polymorphism information content of experimental groups were 0.648, 0.601 and 0.533, respectively. The mating dis-tance of P. koraiensis followed an approximately normal distribution. The most effective pollen for the female parent came from male parent trees 15-45 m away with an average mating dis-tance of 32.60 m and the longest of 67.88 m. The pollen source of offspring was not random but greatly affected by the wind direction during the pollination season of P. koraiensis. These re-sults have important implications for seed or-chard design to improve the genetic quality of seeds and seed production.