Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
National Cancer Institute
National Institutes of Health
(click on image)
You Are in Control of Your Own Health!
Eating more colorful whole foods really matters!
2008 seedlings of a new crop for North America -- Chinese
wolfberry (Lycium barbarum L.) (goji) -- under a breeding plan
with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in British Columbia
for Part 1 on Quirks of Breeding Black Raspberries, click!
Part 2 on Breeding History and Challenges
Management of Berry Breeding
Objective: grow cultivars to establish breeding objectives.
General goals are to improve plant health and fruit quality/quantity ("yield").
- Either decrease required inputs or increase yields, or at least maintain a commercially viable yield.
When breeders head out into the field to evaluate seedlings and make selection decisions, they are faced with 1000s of seedlings that must be evaluated rapidly.
Because there are 1000s, breeders cannot afford to spend much time or money on a single seedling.
The breeder evaluates a group of traits
- plant vigor
- plant architecture
- disease resistance
- tolerance to the environment
- crop load
- berry size, color and shape
If all these traits are positive, then a breeder will stop and inspect traits more carefully for
-
fruit firmness
-
skin toughness
-
ease of picking
-
flavor
Once a selection is into more advanced trials, the breeder spends more time and money on an individual new breed – the genotype.
Coming to the fresh fruit market of North America:
new cultivars of wolfberry (goji)
Meeting Consumer Demands With New Berry Breeds
The challenge with breeding better berries is that many of the traits consumers are interested in are expensive to evaluate.
For instance, breeders could never evaluate all seedlings for antioxidant levels as measured by ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity); the process is simply too expensive and time consuming for thousands of individual plants.
We still can make progress. Since our program is primarily geared towards breeding for the processing industry where intense fruit color is essential, as we select for the best color, we are selecting for high levels of anthocyanins which in turn are powerful antioxidants in vitro.
Future of Berry Breeding
Unfortunately, the number of researchers, especially breeders, worldwide working on berries is relatively small compared to crops like corn, rice and soybeans.
In addition, berry crops tend to be more complicated genetically.
The result of this is that some of the fascinating new technologies related to marker-assisted selection and genetic engineering, will not be even a possibility for regular use in berry breeding programs for the next decade.
There are three primary goals breeders have to bring better berries to the market.
Strawberries (Fragaria vesca), one of the most cross-bred of berry crops
Most important selection criteria
1. intense color
2. outstanding flavor
3. traits that make the crop more economical to produce such as yield, plant architecture, harvestability
While it would be great if breeders could create “designer” berries loaded with phytonutrients, such as increasing resveratrol content (click here for 2009 research abstract*), that breeding process is currently expensive and slow.
However, if breeders can make the fruit more desirable and affordable through the above three traits, we are more likely to increase public interest in and consumption of berries, and have the greatest impact on public health.
References
* Molecular engineering of resveratrol in plants. Plant Biotechnol J. 2009 Jan;7(1):2-12.
Main message from this research: production of resveratrol can lead to broad-spectrum resistance against fungi in transgenic plants, and to the enhancement of resveratrol's content in several fruits, highlighting the potential role for resveratrol in human health promotion and plant disease control.
