RosBREED2: More Traits, Additional Crops, Expanded Germplasm, New Science

U.S. rosaceous crops industries have prioritized the development of new cultivars that combine disease resistance and superior horticultural quality and thereby mitigate production, handling and market risks. For decades, rosaceous crop breeders have identified and introgressed resistance from wild and/or unadapted germplasm, but few have achieved commercial success due to linkage drag, scant genetic information, resource-intensive phenotyping, and limited selection tools. The USDA-NIFA-SCRI project entitled “RosBREED: Combining disease resistance and horticultural quality in new rosaceous cultivars” (“RosBREED 2” for short) is addressing this need through a multidisciplinary effort that will empower breeding programs of rosaceous crops to routinely apply modern genomics and genetics tools to efficiently and effectively deliver cultivars with producer-required disease resistances and market-demanded horticultural quality. The project builds on the recently concluded USDA-NIFA-SCRI project “RosBREED: Enabling marker-assisted breeding in Rosaceae”. This project enabled the first successful routine adoption of DNA-based information for fruit quality improvement in U.S. apple, peach, cherry, and strawberry breeding programs, directly and quickly increasing breeding efficiency, accuracy, and creativity. Four crops are newly included in RosBREED 2 (blackberry, pear, rose, and Prunus rootstocks) and 16 disease threats are newly targeted. These activities involve 23 breeding programs from 12 states. The use of DNA information will be expanded from individual QTL/major trait loci to develop a genome-wide understanding of effects of minor and major loci and enrich breeding families. Additionally, genomic and statistical tools will be applied to account for non-genetic effects on trait variation. RosBREED 2 is funded by the USDA-NIFA-SCRI Award number 2014-51181-22378.