Genetics and Genomics for New Apple and Kiwifruit Cultivars

Consumers of whole foods such as fruits demand consistent high quality and drive the development of new varieties with enhanced health, convenience, novel taste, and reduced impact on the environment.  Conventional breeding of temperate fruit crops such as apples and kiwifruit exploits both existing cultivars and the extensive germplasm collections of related species and novel accessions.

Our genomics research is focused on the key producer and consumer traits.  We achieve this by defining the biology of these traits and developing an understanding of the processes in model plants.  Our translational genomics research then uses this molecular information in our target crops.  To do this we make use of RNAseq and whole genome sequences databases and transformation-based forward genetics.   Finally we search our germplasm collections for alleles of these genes that can contribute to these novel traits and integrated them into our parental and commercial breeding populations. 

Increasingly the genetics of our fruit crops are also exploiting next generation sequencing techniques.  For simple genetic traits marker assisted selection has been used whereas more complex traits appear to lend themselves to association genetics approached using either SNP chip or whole genome sequencing.  

In this presentation we will use our work on anthocyanin accumulation and vitamin C as example of how these approached are being used.