2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Strawberry (Fragaria ×ananassa) fruit flavor is due to a complex mix of sugars, acids, and aromatic compounds. Consumers tend to prefer sweeter strawberry cultivars. Therefore, sweetness has been an important target trait for breeders. The majority of strawberry soluble solids are sugars, and soluble solids content (SSC) is used as a proxy to determine sweetness. A strong genotype × environment (G × E) interaction has been observed for SSC, causing difficulties when studying the genetics underlying SSC in individual environments. A meta-analysis of multiple environments may provide new insights toward unraveling the genetics underlying SSC. Genotypic and phenotypic data were collected for 3,407 total individuals from seven breeding programs (four in the United States, one from Spain, the United Kingdom, and Australia). Subsets of the individuals were evaluated for SSC in 19 environments. Genotypic information from the 90K and 35K Axiom arrays was reduced to 12,951 high quality single nucleotide polymorphism markers shared by all accessions. Missing data was imputed, linkage disequilibrium was calculated, and a relationship matrix was constructed for all samples. Using this information, multiple G × E models were evaluated for their predictive ability among environments. Results demonstrate how genomic models can be used to predict strawberry SSC in new environments.