S16 - Session P3 - Variability in crosses for pear rootstocks adaptation to global warming

Authors: Marie-Helene Simard *, Christian Cattaneo, Michel Boucourt, marie-laure Genouël, david lanoue

Since its creation, INRAE Angers has a long tradition and experience on pear rootstock breeding. It released the pear rootstock "Pyriam" in 1997 showing straight habit in nursery, good compatibility and productivity with "Williams", fire blight and calcareous soil tolerance. This paper presents the outputs of the programme developped from 1996 to 2022 which mainly focused on dwarfing or/and adaptation to global warming especially hot summer, droughtness and iron-chlorosis. During this period, 18 crosses have been performed which produced 9605 seeds; the main selection criteria have been rooting rate, compatibility with "Williams", induced vigour, plants habit and tolerance to fire blight. After a long selection process, some promising genotypes are now propagated for further testing by our private partners CEP-INNOVATION. Besides, 25 open pollinations of drought tolerance prospected species gave 2089 seeds. This paper will describe the different steps of selection; it will also highlight the great genetic variability observed for all important agronomic traits.