Breeding Lettuce to Maximize Nutrional Content Across Diverse Environments

Maintaining a stable phenotype across multiple environments is a key, but elusive, breeding goal.  From a genetic perspective, the phenotype is a product of an organism’s genetic composition and its interaction with the environment.  Several complex biosynthetic pathways, including the phenylpropanoid and carotenoid pathways, are responsible for key nutritional components of lettuce.  When grown across multiple environments we have observed large differences in nutritional content in highly inbred genetic lines.  This plasticity in trait expression can be due to either genetic or epigenetic effects.  We explore the possibility of assembling specific alleles or epialleles to maximize trait stability for this trait and how it might be applied to other genetically complex traits.