Location: Crop Improvement and Protection Research
Project Number: 2038-22000-019-070-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Nov 1, 2024
End Date: Apr 30, 2027
Objective:
Characterize the genetics of resistance to California Fusarium oxysporum race 2 and develop tools for marker assisted or genomic selection of strawberry seedlings.
Approach:
Seedlings will be inoculated with a virulent isolate of California Fof race 2. Disease severity will be evaluated every week by scoring on a 1 to 5 ordinal rating score. This method of rating disease has proven highly effective for identifying genomic loci associated with resistance to Fof race 1; it was used for the discovery of five QTLs for Fusarium wilt race 1 resistance (called: Fw1, Fw2, Fw3, Fw4, and Fw5).
If QTL are identified for resistance to California Fof race 2, five kompetitive allele-specific PCR (KASP) assays will be designed targeting the most predict SNPs for this trait. The project team will test multiple KASP assays, as they can have error rates that are hard to predict from the sequence alone and need wet-lab verification. The KASP assays will be tested using DNA from the 500 seedlings that were phenotyped for resistance.