Breeding for Quality in Blueberries

The overall fruit quality of highbush blueberry cultivars has undergone steady improvement since the crop was domesticated in the 1910s. In particular, advances have been made in fruit size, skin color, firmness and size of scar, as well as post-harvest storage life. Improvements in flavor have proven more difficult, with some of the more important cultivars being bland in flavor or too acid. Nutritional aspects such as antioxidant capacity, while deemed important, have received little direct breeding activity. A particularly large storehouse of genetic variability is available for improving fruit quality traits through wide species hybridization. It is not unusual for highbush blueberry breeders to release cultivars with three or more species in their pedigree.  In particular, the incorporation of wild V. darrowii into the genome of the highbush blueberry has yielded numerous unexpected fruit quality advances. The future challenge will be to clearly identify those fruit quality characteristics of highest priority and produce improved genotypes that are still high enough yielding and in the appropriate cropping season to be economically feasible. It is likely that blueberry breeders will soon use genetic linkage maps and molecular markers to facilitate the selection process.