S05 - Session O5 - Keynote: Genomics and computer assisted breeding: fact or fiction to arrive at sustainable resilient ornamental crop production

Authors: Richard Visser *

Ornamental breeding is largely done by phenotypic improvement based on offspring performance, but is lagging behind breeding in field crops and vegetables, not only because there are so many different types of ornamental crops (so relatively small markets), but also quite a few of them are polyploid and vegetatively propagated crops which makes breeding efficiency and efficacy low. The challenges and demands are plentiful making a faster and more precision breeding of these crops necessary. In many countries around the world ornamentals are grown under protective cover of screen- or greenhouses making control of growth and the final quality of the harvested product to some extent predictable. However, more and more chemical control agents are forbidden and the percentage of residues still allowed to be found on crops by the major buyers become lower each year, which makes resistant varieties a must in the most important ornamentals. Next to this as the Covid 19 pandemic has shown us -although there is a larger demand for ornamentals worldwide by consumers- transport of ornamentals from countries like Kenia, Tanzania and Colombia is becoming more expensive and difficult. This puts demands on the keepability of ornamentals, because transport is more and more done by boat rather than by plane. These aspects require that resistance breeding and breeding for prolonged transportability and storability of ornamentals have to be done at a faster pace and with greater success. As breeding will be more directed along the genotypic scale based on the well-informed selection of parental lines or crossing parents, sufficient genomic resources should exist and integration of large amounts of data should be possible, linked to the availability of (software) tools to query all these kinds of databases in the most efficient way to arrive at future proof ornamental crops.