Mapping Human Taste Perception on the Apple Genome

Breeding apples can take 10-20 years before elite cultivars are selected and tested for production and commercial value.  In 2011, Vineland initiated an apple breeding program in partnership with the Ontario Apple Growers.  Consultation with the apple sector strongly emphasized the importance of breeding high quality, marketable apples.  Vineland launched an apple project to merge human sensory perception, consumer preference, analytical evaluation and apple genome sequencing with a long term goal of mapping the human taste experience onto the apple genome.  This would give the breeding program valuable insight into genomic regions and DNA markers that are associated with high quality attributes of apple that are preferred by consumers.  A collection of 80 apple accessions were examined over 2 years by a human sensory panel measuring 18 attributes, a consumer taste panel to measure preference, 5 analytical measures and Genotype-by-Sequencing (GBS).  The genome wide association analysis showed human sensory traits could be mapped including juciness, crispness, mealiness, and fresh apple flavour with QTL explaining between 20-35% of the trait variation.  The research also leads to a search for causative genes and SNPs underlying the mapped traits.  This presentation will summarize the current findings from the project and discuss next steps plus applications of this approach in other crop species.