FRUIT AND OIL CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVANCED SELECTIONS FROM AN OLIVE BREEDING PROGRAM

Early bearing, high yield, oil content, mechanical harvesting aptitude, expanded ripening period and oil quality are some of the main objectives of breeding programs aiming at obtaining new olive cultivars for olive oil production. These characters are mainly evaluated in the last steps of the breeding work where a reduced number of genotypes with high number of replications are evaluated. In this work, fruit and oil characteristics of eight advanced selections of a breeding program in Córdoba, Spain, together with ‘Arbequina’ and ‘Picual’ cultivars as controls were studied. Significant differences between genotypes were observed for all the characters under study. Variation of fruit and oil characters was evaluated once a month from September to December. This allows the comparison of ranking of genotypes throughout the ripening period considering different dates or ripening index of samples. Also the optimal harvesting date for each genotype based on patterns for oil accumulation, oil quality characters and ease of fruit detachment, was determined. Future work is planned to evaluate the adaptation of the most promising selection to different environments.