Developing improved plant architecture in strawberry
Title: Turning over a new leaf: Use of state-of-the-art phenotyping and genomics to breed for cost reducing plant architecture in strawberry
Funder: Growing Kent & Medway
Industry partners: Edward Vinson Plants Ltd
Term: April 2023 to March 2025
Project leader: Dan Sargent
Strawberry production costs have risen sharply in recent years, but returns to growers have remained static. If production is to remain profitable in future, growers must find ways of increasing strawberry yields, whilst also reducing growing costs and this includes plant and picking management. With combined labour costs of plant management and harvesting amounting to more than 50% of the total production costs, manipulating plant architecture might help. Growers need a plant with an open habit to improve spray penetration, coupled with long fruit trusses that improve fruit presentation to pickers. To date, no molecular tools have been developed to select for plant habit, but recent work by NIAB in collaboration with the University of Lincoln, has begun to develop new breeding tools which select for several plant characteristics using computer vision and machine learning.
The project
This project will aim to develop molecular markers to help breed new strawberry varieties. It will use cutting edge machine-learning technologies to capture data on plant architecture and use this, along with information about the DNA of the strawberry plants to develop tools to breed strawberries with better plant architecture in a classical way (without the use of GM technology).