S19 - Session O1 - Keynote: Genome-Wide Association of Blueberry Fruit Quality Traits

Authors: Patricio Munoz *

Consumers are becoming more intereste than ever in the quality of the blueberry fruits they purchase. As such, this trait is rapidly rising in importance among blueberry growers, marketers, and breeders. Traditional plant breeding has improved many traits, but it is slow and time-consuming when applied to perennial crops. New technology has led to the development of innovative plant breeding techniques that can allow for measurable improvement of traits such as fruit quality in a far shorter time span. One of these techniques is marker-assisted breeding (MAB), an approach currently being applied to several agronomic crops and one that is slowly becoming employed with berry crops. Marker-assisted selection (MAS) or genomic prediction (GP, also known as genomic selection) are two types of MAB. Unlike MAS, GP does not require a marker or gene discovery phase to be successfully utilized; nevertheless, including such a phase has been shown to markedly improve GP prediction accuracy. When it comes to berry crops, quantitative trait loci (QTL) have been traditionally used for the marker discovery process. However, with the increase in genetic and genomic resources available to breeders along with the decreased cost of obtaining sequencing data genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) is rapidly becoming a viable alternative that circumvents the flaws of QTL analysis. The University of Florida Blueberry Breeding Program has been applying GP since 2019 and has simultaneously been using its breeding populations to perform marker discovery using GWAS for many berry fruit quality traits. During this talk we will discuss the processes utilized as well as the different studies we have performed to determine population sizes, molecular marker requirements, and statistical modeling for improving the outcomes of these analyses. We will also discuss some of the relevant discoveries that should change the way we perceive fruit quality with the objective to create an impact in the consumer eating experience.