Does marker-assisted selection make dollars and sense in a fruit breeding program?

By James Luby, D. Shaw. 2001

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

period, an extended juvenile phase for seedlings, and a marketable product that cannot be assessed until a seedling is physiologically mature. Their perishable product consists largely of water and, thus, is subject to numerous interactions of genetic effects with consumer preferences, as well as with biotic and abiotic factors during preharvest and postharvest periods. The fruit breeder requires that selected individuals exceed a certain level of performance, a culling level, for each of a host of traits desired by producers, processors, and consumers. The culling levels for most traits are usually independent of one another. Each trait is also weighted relative to its importance for the commercial success of a cultivar. Most breeders also take advantage of multiple-stage selection by emphasizing a limited number of traits when first evaluating nonreplicated seedlings and then considering the full suite of traits in advanced testing of clonally replicated genotypes. Inheritance of traits. A few traits may have demonstrably simple inheritance because the effects of one or two genes are large compared with environmental effects. Individuals in segregating populations can usually be assigned to discrete groups corresponding directly to their genotypes. For most traits of interest, however, individuals in a segregating population cannot be assigned to discrete classes, but are distributed continuously along a quantitative scale. Termed quantitative traits, their continuous distribution is presumably due to from several (oligogenic) to many (polygenic) gene loci with effects of varying magnitude that may be small relative to environmental effects. The simultaneous selection for multiple oligogenic or polygenic traits insures that only a small proportion of individuals will have favorable alleles at a large enough number of loci to be judged superior, and necessitates evaluation of large populations to increase the probability of obtaining and identifying them.

Subfields: Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/299a42965f135e143fb0e865c5512f740a5255ab

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In Plant Science

1. Jim Holland
2. R. Bernardo
3. Cathrine Ziyomo

Citations in the corpus

• Implementation of molecular markers for quantitative traits in breeding programs - challenges and opportunities (2004, background): “Unfortunately, these two situations are not expected to be generally applicable for most traits and most populations (Luby and Shaw 2001).”