A Cost-Effective Strategy for Marker-Assisted Selection (MAS) in Apple (M. pumila Mill.): The Experience from the Edmund Mach Foundation Program for Resistance and Quality Traits

Marker assisted selection (MAS) permits the selection of plants carrying alleles conferring superior phenotypes through the screening of markers tightly linked to those traits. In practice, it is possible to select plants at the seedling stage to enable the breeders to retain only germplasm conferring desirable traits from an early stage. Usually MAS involves the screening of hundreds or thousands of seedlings: the main challenge faced is thus developing a pipeline that begins with a “lab friendly” and unambiguous seedling configuration in greenhouse, which then allows the rapid collection of samples avoiding cross contamination, implements a fast, cost-effective, high-throughput method of DNA extraction to be used for a small number of PCRs, and utilizes robust, reliable, and easy to interpret molecular markers. In this work we report on the development of a pipeline at the Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) to enable the implementation of a time and cost effective MAS program for apple (Malus pumila Mill.)