RosBREED: Combining Disease Resistance with Horticultural Quality in New Rosaceous Cultivars

The Rosaceae crop family (including almond, apple, apricot, blackberry, peach, pear, plum, raspberry, rose, strawberry, sweet cherry, and tart cherry) provides vital contributions to human health and is economically significant in communities across the U.S. Industry stakeholders have given high priority to development of new cultivars that exhibit both disease resistance and superior horticultural quality to mitigate production, handling and market risks. Rosaceous crop breeders have responded to the need for genetic solutions by using resistance from wild and/or unadapted germplasm, but few have achieved commercial success because of difficulties breeding cultivars with both high fruit quality and disease resistance. RosBREED addresses this need through a national coordinated effort that will enable breeding programs of U.S. rosaceous crops to routinely apply modern genomics and genetics tools to efficiently and effectively deliver cultivars with producer-required disease resistances and market-essential horticultural quality. Objectives are to: (1) develop donor parents with multiple alleles for disease resistance; (2) enrich breeding families with alleles for disease resistance and superior horticultural quality; (3) advance selections with alleles for superior horticultural quality and disease resistance with improved confidence; (4) increase routine use of DNA information in rosaceous crop breeding; and (5) engage industry stakeholders in project outcomes, evaluation, and adjustment. RosBREED is funded by the USDA-NIFA-SCRI Award number 2014-51181-22378.