“All-round carefree package” for berry breeders
The research project BreedingValue will provide comprehensive information, selected plant material and handsome tools to breeders of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. In a recently published scientific article, we explain why and how.
To promote our activities in the project BreedingValue, a scientific publication explains how we plan to reach the project goals. The project aims at providing pre-breeding accessions and breeding tools to European breeders of strawberry, blueberry and raspberry. Pre-breeding accessions refer to selected plant accessions that exhibit crucial traits that are desirable in future cultivars. This will give berry breeders a boost to compete at a global scale. Breeding tools refer to efficient modern technologies and methods that are needed and helpful in the breeders´ daily work, such as molecular markers that are linked to desired traits and highly increase selection efficiency or improved methods for data collection on traits that need to be considered in the breeding process. A huge asset of BreedingValue is the section on consumer science that will identify trends and requirements on the berry market to define future breeding goals.
In the publication entitled “Towards smart and sustainable development of modern berry cultivars in Europe”, we explain the significance of strawberries, blueberries and raspberries on the food market and briefly summarize previous works with regard to berry research from 1998 until today. We describe how we will show the status and potential of current breeding programs studying plant material that was provided by the project partners that are actively involved in berry breeding. Additionally, “exotic” accessions from genebank collections that include e.g. wild relatives of modern berry species will be characterized in parallel to unravel further potential and fill gaps that may show up among current breeding programs. The publication outlines that the project builds bridges between phenotypic observations, metabolomic analysis and genetic data to lift berry breeding to the next level. Last but not least, we emphasize that during the course of the project, principles of sustainable data management will be followed and the results will be made publicly available on an open-access platform online, alongside steady knowledge and technology transfer with/to the scientific community and berry breeders.
Please enjoy reading our publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tpj.15876 (published online on 5th August 2022)