Location: Horticultural Crops Research Unit
Project Number: 2072-21220-003-004-R
Project Type: Reimbursable Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2014
End Date: Aug 31, 2019
Objective:
1. Develop donor parents with multiple alleles for disease resistance.
2. Enrich breeding families with alleles for disease resistance and superior fruit quality.
3. Advance selections having alleles for superior fruit quality with improved confidence.
4. Increase routine adoption of DNA-informed breeding for rosaceous crops.
5. Engage industry stakeholders in project outcomes, evaluation and design.
Approach:
Domestic and international markets for products of rosaceous crops (apple, almond, caneberries, cherries, peach, pear, plum, rose, and strawberry) demand improved quality. Rosaceous crop producers and supply chain members recognize the need to satisfy this demand yet at the same time manage key pre- and postharvest diseases (1):
Apple – scab, fire blight, blue mold; Peach – bacterial spot, fruit brown rot
Pear – fire blight
Prunus rootstock – Armillaria root rot
Rose – black spot
Sweet Cherry – powdery mildew
Strawberry – root rot complex, bacterial angular leaf spot
Tart Cherry – cherry leaf spot
To meet disease management challenges, U.S. rosaceous industry stakeholders have prioritized development of new cultivars with disease resistance (see section c. on stakeholder input). Unfortunately, unlike many crops, few disease resistant rosaceous cultivars are commercially significant. Breeding challenges include long generation times, poor fruit quality of disease resistance donors, and insufficient genetic tools. High financial and managerial risk is assumed by producers to adopt a new cultivar based on limited data from test plots. Breeders need new knowledge and tools to improve and accelerate cultivar release, while industry sectors need reliable information to mitigate risk in adopting new cultivars.
The proposed project directly addresses these problems in a coordinated national effort to enable U.S. rosaceous crop breeders to routinely apply genomic tools to efficiently deliver cultivars with producer-required disease resistances and market-essential horticultural quality. The long-term outcome of this large-scale coordination will be cultivars that mitigate production and market risks and increase consumer demand and well-being. This project builds on the recent USDA-NIFA-SCRI project “RosBREED: Enabling marker-assisted breeding in Rosaceae,” which provided the first successful routine adoption of DNA-based information for fruit quality improvement in an initial group of U.S. apple, peach, cherry, and strawberry breeding programs (2). That project’s outcomes created a demand among breeding programs and industry stakeholders for the expanded efforts proposed here (see section c. on stakeholder input).
