Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Only ~1 in 4 Canadians consume the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables. Breeding to improve the desirability, nutritional benefits, and appearance of fruit to increase fruit consumption among consumers are critical steps in disease prevention and overall health. Conventional plant breeding is a slow and expensive process, but genomic tools can improve efficiency by enabling trait selection at an early stage using marker-assisted selection. Fruit quality is a critical priority for fruit crop breeding since consumer acceptance is the ultimate driver of cultivar success. My research program focuses on the development and application of genomic resources to accelerate the breeding of consumer-driven quality traits in perennial fruit crops. My proposal focuses on the two most economically important species in the Rosaceae family, apple and strawberry, and will identify genetic markers using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that are associated with critical fruit quality traits. Through collaboration with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), my research program will sample two fruit collections which include ~1,000 apple accessions and 288 strawberry accessions. We will perform low-coverage whole genome sequencing (lcWGS) of these accessions to cost-effectively query the entire genome for GWAS. Objective 1 is to determine the genetic basis of variation in fruit aroma and nutrition. To do this, in collaboration with AAFC (previously funded separately) we will perform GC-MS and LC-MS for both collections. We will identify ~100 aroma compounds and ~3,000 unique metabolomic features including nutritional compounds such as flavonols and anthocyanins. We will link these traits with the lcWGS to perform GWAS across 2 years and both species. Objective 2 is to determine the genetic basis of variation in fruit colour and shape. To do this, we will photograph all fruit from the apple orchard. We will also use historical image data for apples and strawberries that is publicly available. In all cases, we will measure fruit shape, size, and colour using comprehensive and high-throughput image analysis, then link these data with lcWGS for GWAS. Taken together, over the next five years, these two objectives will collect and quantify comprehensive and multidimensional trait data in apple and strawberry to identify genetic markers associated with fruit aroma, nutritional content, and appearance for use in marker-assisted breeding and/or gene editing. We will determine the extent to which the genes responsible for these traits are shared across species within this important plant family. Our work will transform not only our biological understanding of these plants but the food we rely on, resulting in improved human health and a sustainable future for Canadian and global fruit production.