2018 ASHS Annual Conference

A survey developed within the Tools for Polyploid SCRI planning grant collected information on the range of polyploid specialty crops to determine their characteristics and breeding needs. One-hundred and three responses including 36 root/tuber, 25 ornamental, 32 fruit and 10 turf breeding programs were received. The major crops represented were potato, sweetpotato, rose, blueberry, strawberry, kiwi, Rubus, bluegrass and ryegrass. The majority of the polyploid specialty crops were clonally propagated and highly heterozygous with genetic backgrounds that include either interspecific and interploidy hybridization. Although the type of ploidy is not always known, the crops ranged from auto to allopolyploids with many segmental allopolyploids, These crops showed disomic to tetrasomic to mixosomic segregation depending on the crop and genetic background within a crop. Although the most common ploidy level was tetraploid, there were significant numbers of crops that were triploid, hexaploid and octoploid. The programs ranged in size from less than 3,000 to more than 100,000 seedling per year and most commonly used backcrossing, recurrent selection and interspecific hybridization breeding approaches. The major impediments encountered when trying to incorporate genomic tools in their breeding were software tools to analyze polyploids, analytical expertise and more efficient phenotyping tools. On average, the polyploid breeders had medium to high confidence that they would be able to incorporate genomic tools to accelerate their breeding progress within 5 to 10 years.