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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Kearneysville, West Virginia » Appalachian Fruit Research Laboratory » Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #301672

Title: 21st century approach to improving Burbank's 'stoneless' plum

Author
item Callahan, Ann
item Dardick, Christopher - Chris
item TOSETTI, ROBERTA - Istituto Superiore Di Sanita
item Lalli, Donna
item Scorza, Ralph

Submitted to: Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 10/31/2014
Publication Date: 2/1/2015
Citation: Callahan, A.M., Dardick, C.D., Tosetti, R., Lalli, D., Scorza, R. 2015. 21st century approach to improving Burbank's 'stoneless' plum. Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science. 50:195-200.

Interpretive Summary: Luther Burbank was an extraordinary U.S. breeder from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. He is most famous for the standard potato of today, the Burbank Russet, but he also was involved in breeding many crops including various flowers, grasses, vegetables and fruit, especially plums. Luther Burbank wanted to make crops more adapted to man’s uses. One of his goals was to produce a plum that had no hard stone surrounding the seed. He was nearly successful and produced commercially a tree, ‘Conquest’, that bore large, high quality fruit with only a grain of stone. Some of his plum trees were obtained and have been used to restart the program at the Appalachian Fruit Research Station. New techniques are being applied to the project that Luther Burbank did not have, including an understanding of genetics, molecular technologies, and genetic engineering technologies. The results of these studies will aid in the final goal of a completely stoneless, high quality plum fruit.

Technical Abstract: Luther Burbank had a theme running through many of his breeding programs; that of making the plants more tailored to man’s uses. Mr. Burbank thought that in plum fruit the stone was unessential to a tree that was propagated vegetatively, so he chose stoneless plums as a breeding goal. He made two releases, ‘Miracle’ in 1903 and his final and almost perfect, ‘Conquest’ (1911- 1912 catalog), which he considered as one of his best accomplishments in plum breeding. ‘Conquest’ had only a grain of stone and flavor and size comparable to the best French-types of the time, but was not commercially successful. In view of the current desire for seedless fruit (grapes, watermelon, etc.), advanced knowledge of genetics and advanced technologies, we have taken up where Mr. Burbank left off, in the production of a better than almost perfect, stoneless plum. We began by locating what were most likely remnants from Mr. Burbank’s breeding program and we are now utilizing 21st century technology to achieve a completely stoneless high quality plum fruit. These technologies include molecular markers, genetic engineering and accelerated breeding cycles (‘FasTrack’). Initial experiments had characterized the stoneless trait as a decrease in the number of endocarp cells that form the stone. We defined the time critical to the formation of endocarp by analyzing gene expression of a number of transcription factors involved with determining endocarp cells. We identified genes that were expressed differently during this period between normal stone cultivars and one of the ‘Stoneless’ cultivars. In addition, we targeted genes for genetic engineering to reduce the lignifications in endocarp and to reduce or convert endocarp cells to non-lignifying cells. A system, FasTrack, utilizing a flowering gene from poplar, has been incorporated to reduce the juvenility period and eliminate the seasonal aspect of fruiting in order to see the results of the breeding as well as the genetic engineering approach much faster. The combination of these approaches is now in place to attempt to improve on Mr. Burbank’s stoneless plum.