Rosbreed: Enabling Marker-assisted Selection for Postharvest Deterioration in Peach

Peach is a commercially important fruit, second only to apple in terms of temperate fruit tree production. Consumer and market demand is for juicy, firm, flavorful fruit that maintains appealing flesh throughout cold storage. However, peaches often decline in quality after harvest, resulting in reduced consumer acceptance. Developing new peach cultivars using traditional breeding methods can take 15-20 years for the release a new cultivar with improved characteristics. For this reason, the discovery and implementation of marker-assisted breeding holds great promise as a significant mitigation strategy to offset the temporal burden of cultivar development. This project represents a national collaborative effort among peach breeding programs at Clemson University, the University of Arkansas, the University of California, Davis, and Texas A&M University to perform standardized post-harvest analysis and to identify appropriate genetic markers associated with post-harvest performance in peach. In particular, symptoms of “chilling injury” during cold storage are the focus of initial phenotyping. Further, this phenotypic information will be combined with genotypic data in accordance with the overall goals of the RosBREED initiative. Results from the first year of the standardized post-harvest phenotyping protocol are discussed.