Most almond cultivars are susceptible to negative temperatures, a limiting factor for almond expansion
to regions with risks of spring frosts. As a consequence, the main objective of most almond breeding
programmes is to select late- or very late-blooming genotypes, in order to avoid the periods of
high frost risk. Flower and fruitlet tolerance to frosts has been only studied so far by observing the
morphological damages produced by low temperatures. Thus, our objective was the evaluation of
chlorophyll fluorescence (FC) to estimate the tolerance of 12 commercial almond cultivars from different
origin to low temperatures. Flowers were maintained during 24 hours at different temperatures
(0º, -1º, -2º and -3ºC), measuring FC afterwards. In general, the variable fluorescence (Fv) and the ratio
Fv/Fm (being Fm the maximal fluorescence) decreased with time in all genotypes, although the decreasing
rate depended on the genotype. The decrease of these parameters was slower in the cultivars
tolerant to low temperatures, whereas the decrease was linear or/and sigmoid in the susceptible cultivars.
In general, the classification of genotypes according to their frost tolerance level with this technique
agreed with the published references. These results lay out that chlorophyll fluorescence is a
promising technique (fast, quantitative, easy and non-destructive) to ascertain the tolerance of
almond genotypes to frosts independently of their blooming time.
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