Stonefruit

Science programme: Pipfruit and summerfruit breeding

Our program aims to develop summerfruit cultivars adapted to the New Zealand conditions for the export industry.

Therefore we are focusing on:

• Identifying genotypes that are very firm-fleshed and supersweet, with novel flavour traits in our summerfruit breeding germplasm.
• Introducing the use of molecular marker technology to identify foundation genotypes, and for seedling selection of progeny with high sugar, crispness and flavour characteristics for incorporation into advanced breeding lines.
• Evaluating the sensory components of high-sugar lines in a targeted sensory analysis. (See Sensory & consumer science )

Here are few relevant achievements:

• Several very firm peach selections with crisp-fleshed texture derived from the Korean variety 'Yumyeong' have been released from the programme. These include 'Scarlet O’Hara', 'Coconut Ice', 'Southern Ice' and 'Southern Star'.
• Several successful cultivars including the very important mid-late season export apricots 'CluthaGold', 'Vulcan' and 'Alex' have been released from the apricot breeding programme.
• We are indentifying indivual fruit sugars in nectarines with high soluble solids.  This is the first major step towards the development of marker assisted selection for this trait in summerfruit breeding.

Our capabilities cover:

• The maintenance and evaluation of summerfruit germplasm
• Genetic markers for tree and fruit traits
• Marker maps and marker assisted selection
• Functional genomics of tree and fruit characters
• Consumer preferences for novel fruit products.

The summerfruit breeding programme is funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST) and Summerfruit New Zealand Inc. (SNZ). The breeding programme has strategic alliances with international research groups such as IRTA  (Spain), which has an advanced Prunus genomics programme.