‘Schmidt's Antonovka’ is identical to ‘Common Antonovka’, an apple cultivar widely used in Russia in breeding for biotic and abiotic stresses

Progenies of ‘Schmidt's Antonovka’ (SA) have been widely used in Western breeding programs as a source of scab resistance. The identity of SA has remained obscure, especially due to the existence of a series of ‘Antonovka’ cultivars with different origins. In this paper we show Schmidt's Antonovka to be identical to Анто́новка обыкновенный or ‘Common Antonovka’ (CA), an old Russian cultivar of unknown origin, by comparing simple sequence repeat (SSR) and SNP genotyping data from several first-generation descendants of SA from two European collections and a CA accession from the germplasm collection held at VNIISPK (The All-Russian Research Institute of Horticultural Breeding, Orel, Russia). The use of CA in Russian breeding programs is also briefly reviewed.