Loci Important for Apple Fruit Quality: What Is Known about Their Functional Alleles?

Delicious taste, excellent texture, and attractive appearance are attributes of apple fruit quality highly desired by consumers and targeted by U.S. breeders. RosBREED’s powerful collaborative approach, with multi-institution standardized phenotyping, high-resolution genome-scanning with cutting-edge technologies, careful choice of breeding-representative germplasm, software capability to analyze QTLs across mixed pedigrees, and systematic conversion-to-application has not only detected but validated interesting QTLs with valuable alleles for apple fruit quality. If a trait is under genetic control and it has been phenotyped, chances are very good that we will find its controlling loci and translate them into the language of crop improvement. With our focus on determining functional alleles/haplotypes and their distribution in breeding germplasm, we are ensuring that, at long last, DNA information from QTL studies is applicable for breeding. In this presentation, functional alleles at trait loci such as Md-ACS1, Md-ACO1, Ma, and Rf for taste, texture, appearance, and other components of apple fruit quality will be described in a practical breeding context.