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Abstract
The timing of fruit maturity is an important trait in sweet cherry production and breeding. Phenotypic variation for phenology of fruit maturity in sweet cherry appears to be under strong genetic control, but that control might be complicated by phenotypic instability across environments. Although such genotype-by-environment interaction (G × E) is a common phenomenon in crop plants, knowledge about it is lacking for fruit maturity timing and other sweet cherry traits. In this study, 1673 genome-wide SNP markers were used to estimate genomic relationships among 597 weakly pedigree-connected individuals evaluated over two seasons at three locations in Europe and one location in the USA, thus sampling eight ‘environments’. The combined dataset enabled a single meta-analysis to investigate the environmental stability of genomic predictions. Linkage disequilibrium among marker loci declined rapidly with physical distance, and ordination of the relationship matrix suggested no strong structure among germplasm. The most parsimonious G × E model allowed heterogeneous genetic variance and pairwise covariances among environments. Narrow-sense genomic heritability was very high (0.60–0.83), as was accuracy of predicted breeding values (>0.62). Average correlation of additive effects among environments was high (0.96) and breeding values were highly correlated across locations. Results indicated that genomic models can be used in cherry to accurately predict date of fruit maturity for untested individuals in new environments. Limited G × E for this trait indicated that phenotypes of individuals will be stable across similar environments. Equivalent analyses for other sweet cherry traits, for which multiple years of data are commonly available among breeders and cultivar testers, would be informative for predicting performance of elite selections and cultivars in new environments.
Highlights
The timing of fruit maturity is important for sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) production, given the brief shelf life of the fruit
No obvious structure was apparent in the overall relationships among and within germplasm assessed at the four locations
The degree of decay in linkage disequilibrium (LD) among loci with increasing physical distance across the sweet cherry germplasm in this study is comparable, but slightly weaker, than that reported for only the Bourran germplasm[40]
Summary
The timing of fruit maturity is important for sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) production, given the brief shelf life of the fruit. Fruit produced in the early or later part of the production season attracts higher prices than in the mid-season[8]. There is evidence that phenotypic variation in phenology of fruit maturity in sweet cherry is under strong genetic control, suggesting breeding opportunities for this trait. Sweet cherry cultivars are divided according to their maturity date into early (e.g., ‘Burlat’ and ‘Chelan’), mid- (e.g., ‘Bing’) and late season (e.g., ‘Sumtare’)[9]. Individual broad-sense heritability of fruit maturity timing is high (0.76–0.83)[10,11] and large-effect Quantiatative Trait
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