CITRUS BREEDING IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE PROGRAMME RUN BY THE ARC-INSTITUTE FOR TROPICAL AND SUBTROPICAL CROPS

The South African Agricultural Research Council’s Citrus Plant Improvement Programme run by the Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Crops consists of a number of separate projects. These involve conventional scion breeding to improve productivity and quality, rootstock breeding for soil adaption, disease resistance and improved yields, mutation breeding, and evaluation of both scions and rootstocks in different climatic zones. These projects are also supported through the Citrus Improvement Programme, a vast germplasm collection, various biotechnology techniques such as embryo rescue and ploidy manipulation, and the use of molecular markers to distinguish between, at this stage, citrus mandarin selections. This paper gives a short overview of the research activities within each one of the projects, as well as the most important results achieved.