2018 ASHS Annual Conference

A survey of U.S. carrot growers and seed industry stakeholders was conducted and a meeting was held in 2015 to identify key traits important for improved carrot quality and productivity anticipated to meet future market demands. The feedback revealed that the carrot industry needs breeding stocks and genomic tools that can be used to develop carrots with improved field performance, including disease and pest resistance, and abiotic stress tolerance; and improved flavor and nutritional quality to better meet consumer needs. Given this critical stakeholder input, the goals of this project are to: 1) phenotype diverse carrot germplasm and breeding stocks to discover and characterize variation for traits important for improving carrots for the U.S. market; 2) develop an expanded carrot genomic and phenotypic database for breeders to catalogue genomic variation and track genes underlying important traits; 3) initiate the development of breeding pools from diverse germplasm and breeding stocks that include alleles for improved crop production and consumer quality traits, and test them on-farm with growers, including for flavor and nutritional value for consumers; and 4) assess the market value and impacts of carrot traits on grower and consumer decisions. A timeline of activities has been developed, with evaluation of approximately 750 modern and heirloom open-pollinated cultivars; landraces from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America; and breeding lines from public sector carrot improvement programs initiated. To date, new sources of resistance to Alternaria leaf blight and root-knot nematodes, reduced incidence of bolting, and improved stand establishment, flavor, and nutritional quality have been identified preliminarily. The development of breeding pools has been initiated to capture enriched sources of allelic variation useful for carrot breeders, and an expanded carrot database that includes both genomic and phenotypic data is being created.