GENETIC PARAMETERS ASSOCIATED WITH YIELD AND YIELD COMPONENTS IN RED RASPBERRY

Breeding for high yield is a major objective of most small fruit breeding programmes worldwide. High yield and good fruit chemical characters are needed in new commercial process machine harvest raspberry cultivars. In 2008 a genetic inheritance study was established in order to gain a better understanding of the heritability of traits associated with machine harvesting and the most important yield components. The study was conducted over two seasons, in Washington State USA, on 1008 genotypes of red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) from a pairwise mating design study which was based on 85 full-sib families derived from 45 parents. Estimates of variance components, heritabilities, and phenotypic and genetic correlations for yield and yield components were obtained. The highest genetic correlations with total yield were berry weight, cane length and cane diameter and highest expected genetic gain of total yield per breeding cycle was from indirect selection through berry weight.