Future Apple Varieties: Disease-Resistant and Locally Adapted Across Sweden
Project overview
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Short summary
The overall goal of the project is to establish infrastructure, tools, and processes that enable an efficient plant breeding process within the Swedish apple breeding program, ensuring its continued ability to deliver high-performing and climate-adapted apple varieties to Swedish apple growers.
Apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) is the most widely cultivated fruit in Sweden and therefore plays an important role in the country’s food self-sufficiency. Apple is a high-value crop that requires relatively intensive labor. As such, apple orchards contribute to rural employment while also providing economically sustainable diversification within agriculture.
Apple breeding is conducted in many parts of the world, but Sweden’s local climate places specific demands on the apple varieties grown here. To meet these particular challenges and support Swedish apple growers, Sweden has maintained a dedicated apple breeding program since the 1940s.
Modern and efficient plant breeding requires access to knowledge and information about the inheritance of key traits. With such information, it becomes possible to make better choices of parent plants for new crosses and to design precise tools for the efficient selection of seedlings and selections resulting from these crosses.
With improved parent selection and more cost-effective seedling selection, breeders can either use the same resources to create more crosses or free up resources for complementary breeding processes.
In this project, we will continue developing infrastructure for the effective use of genomic information in parent selection—building on work initiated in the previous apple project within SLU Grogrund. The project will also focus on developing methods and techniques to enable more efficient selection among seedlings and selections for several prioritized traits.