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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Kearneysville, West Virginia » Appalachian Fruit Research Laboratory » Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #319357
Title: Rapid cycle breeding: Application of transgenic early flowering for perennial trees

Author
item Callahan, Ann
item Srinivasan, Chinnathambi
item Dardick, Christopher - Chris
item Scorza, Ralph

Submitted to: Plant Breeding Reviews
Publication Type: Review Article
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/15/2015
Publication Date: 8/31/2016
Citation: Callahan, A.M., Srinivasan, C., Dardick, C.D., Scorza, R. 2016. Rapid cycle breeding: Application of transgenic early flowering for perennial trees. Plant Breeding Reviews. 40:299-334.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The prolonged juvenility period common to woody perennial plants, often ranging from 3-10 years or more, is a major impediment to breeding. It seriously undermines the ability to make positive crop improvements or react to emerging threats in a reasonable time frame. Recently, precocious flowering in perennial trees has been induced through the ectopic expression of a number of genes involved in the induction and formation of flowers. The successes reported have thus far exploited a handful of genes including a birch MADS box gene (MADS4) similar to FRUITFULL and the FLOWERING LOCUS T gene from various species. Transgenic plants over-expressing these flowering regulatory genes display significantly shorter juvenility periods, typically one year or less. These modified plants have been used successfully in apple and plum to develop rapid cycle breeding programs that enable trait introgression in a few years rather than a few decades. While the breeding system leverages genetically engineered plants to accelerate breeding, the output is conventional varieties as the ectopically expressed flowering gene can be selected against to yield non-transgenic progeny. Hence, the utilization of the accelerated flowering via biotechnology yields a Rapid Cycle Breeding (RCB) system through which crop improvement can be significantly accelerated.