Prospects for achieving durable disease resistance with elite fruit quality in apple breeding

Abstract

Apple industries suffer from major apple diseases because of widely planted susceptible cultivars. Developed disease-resistant cultivars that often carry only a single source of resistance are not expected to be durable over time. Cultivars with multiple sources of resistance are often commercially unacceptable due to unsatisfactory fruit quality alleles inherited from unimproved and improved parents. To improve fruit quality, approximately five modified backcrossing generations have been used with phenotypic selection for offspring with the least proportion of unimproved genome and elite fruit quality. Modified backcrossing is time-consuming owing to the long juvenility of apple. Unimproved parents are always assumed to carry undesirable alleles in addition to the targeted resistance allele. To efficiently identify favorable offspring each generation, DNA-based markers would be useful. Locus-specific DNA tests are unavailable to detect many sources of resistance alleles. Known numbers of DNA segments from unimproved parents could help subsequent parent selection among offspring because of the direct connection to the probability of eliminating such segments each generation. Accurately estimating the proportion and number of unimproved segments requires precise information on genomic positions of recombinations that can be detected with effective genetic marker sets. High-resolution and genome-wide apple SNP arrays can be used to characterize unimproved DNA segments present in disease-resistant offspring to efficiently achieve durable resistance and elite fruit quality. To hasten apple flowering, a rapid generation cycling approach with transgenic genetic stocks is available. Using these tools is expected to effectively exploit additional unimproved germplasm toward apple genetic improvement.