Marker Assisted Breeding for Red Skin Coloration in Peach

Red skin coloration, or blush, is an important trait for fresh market peaches. High red skin coloration is appealing to the consumer’s eye and the anthocyanin compound associated with blush provides flavor and nutrients important in the daily human diet. Blush is quantitatively inherited and presents practical challenges in selection. Nonetheless, traditional breeding has been successful in developing peach cultivars with increased levels of blush; though traditional breeding is time consuming with at least 15 years before a new cultivar release. Therefore, to overcome the limitations of traditional breeding and ensure development of high blush peach cultivars, application of molecular marker(s) associated with blush development via marker-assisted selection (MAS) was evaluated. Previous research reported a major QTL locus, Blush.Pp.ZC-3.1, associated with blush in peach. Two single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers, flanking blush QTL, SNP_IGA_341962 and SNP_3_12878608, were converted into Cleaved Amplified Polymorphic Sequence (CAPS) markers, and evaluated for their MAS potential in peach. A high blush genotype (AA or TG) was observed in 82 and 62% of analyzed material, confirming the tendency of modern peach breeding programs to develop high blushed cultivars. Application of these markers in a fresh market peach breeding program will enable parental selection to ensure a majority of progeny with the desired phenotype, and seedling selection to suggest which progeny to keep for further evaluation.