News about Genetic improvement

Interspecific hybrids – as new sources for sweet and sour cherry breeding

Breeding

11 Dec 2023

At Dresden-Pillnitz interspecific crosses and backcrosses have been carried out over the last 20 years. The aims of this breeding program are to develop genotypes with new fruit characteristics and a higher level of resistance to biotic and abiotic stress.

How to increase fruit size? By silencing growth-limiting genes

Breeding

29 Nov 2023

In fruits in which PavKLUH was silenced, a decrease in fruit size was observed, due to less expansion of the mesocarp cells. By identifying a new gene encoding for PavKLUH, PavRAV2, a transcription factor capable of physically interacting with the PavKLUH promoter, was selected.

Decade-long study identifies more than one million polymorphisms on cherry genome

Breeding

24 Nov 2023

Phenotypic diversity was assessed from 2012 to 2020, revealing significant variability in several traits. A total of 1,767,106 single nucleotide polymorphisms were discovered, providing a detailed genetic map.