RosBREED2: Progress and future plans to enable DNAinformed breeding in the Rosaceae

Rosaceous crops provide vital contributions to human health worldwide and are economically significant in many communities across the U.S. Industry stakeholders have routinely given high priority to developing new cultivars exhibiting disease resistance and superior horticultural quality to mitigate production, handling and market risks. Unfortunately, U.S. rosaceous crop breeders using resistance from wild and/or unadapted germplasm have developed very few commercially successful cultivars combining both high horticultural quality and disease resistance. The USDAfunded project entitled "RosBREED: Combining disease resistance and horticultural quality in new rosaceous cultivars" (called "RosBREED 2") addresses this need through a multidisciplinary effort to develop and validate modern genomics and genetics tools for implementation in breeding programs of rosaceous crops. Crops included are: Apple, blackberry, peach, pear, rose, strawberry, sweet and tart cherry, and Prunus rootstocks. The vision is that rosaceous crop breeding programs that routinely apply DNA information will more efficiently, accurately, and creatively deliver cultivars with market-essential horticultural quality and producer-required disease resistances to mitigate stakeholder risk and enhance consumer demand for these fruit, nut, and floral products. The objectives are to: 1) develop donor parents with multiple alleles for disease resistance, 2) enrich breeding families with alleles for disease resistance and superior horticultural quality, 3) advance selections with alleles for superior fruit quality with improved confidence, 4) increase routine adoption of DNA-informed breeding for rosaceous crops, and 5) engage industry stakeholders in project outcomes, evaluation, and adjustments.