CURRENT PROGRESS IN TRANS- AND CISGENIC APPLE AND STRAWBERRY BREEDING

A summary is presented of the state-of-the-art in apple and strawberry biotechnological research going on in the department of Plant Breeding at Wageningen University and Research Centre. In apple, the research directed towards the introduction of scab resistance by inserting a barley gene has reached the stage of a field trial where performance of transgenic lines could be tested in an orchard situation. The development of a marker-free system allowing the removal of undesired sequences when desired will lead to the generation of cisgenic apples carrying only newly introduced apple genes. Knocking out the major allergen in apple by RNAi technology has decreased the allergenic reaction in sensitive patients. In strawberry, progress was made in studying firmness and flavor using genetic modification and antisense technology and introducing resistance to Botrytis following an intragenic approach where a strawberry promoter is used to provide a new expression pattern of a strawberry gene.