Standardized Phenotyping in Rosaceae

A new initiative in the international Rosaceae genomics, genetics, and breeding community!

With a shared ancestral genome, the details of which are beginning to come to light from structural and comparative genomics research, the possibility exists to discover common gene networks underlying traits of interest to crops of the Rosaceae family. Techniques in genomics and bioinformatics are rapidly expanding for such comparative efforts, and the bottleneck is now the availability of readily comparable phenotypic data. Recent meetings on this topic in the US held by Gayle Volk, involving germplasm curators, breeders, and researchers, have begun to identify the challenges in obtaining phenotypic data that can be meaningfully transferred across Rosaceae germplasm sets. Standardized phenotyping can be as "simple" as aligning data collection methods for a crop between two research locations, or between a breeding program and a genomics research study. It is more difficult to obtain phenotypic data for two different crops, particularly across subfamilies, that have the likelihood of being under common genetic control. Achieving this goal, however, holds the promise of strengthening Rosaceae-wide ties between breeding programs, germplasm collections, and genetics and genomics research.

The Standardized Phenotyping webpage is being created on the GDR (thanks Dorrie!). At first, the site will contain lots of background material and minutes of recent meetings. We will keep this website updated so that visitors can learn of progress and join general and trait-specific mailing lists.

For those of you who will be at the Eucarpia Fruit Breeding Conference in Zaragoza in a couple of weeks, an ad hoc gathering will be held. In an international context, we will discuss standardized phenotyping in each of the four categories of quality, pest and disease resistance, abiotic stress resistance/adaptation, and productivity (including flowering and plant architecture).We will seek to create subgroups of interested people to continue discussions in each category into the future. The time and place of this meeting is still to be determined, but will probably be after the RosIGI meeting on Monday 17 September. The agenda will be posted on the Standardized Phenotyping website. Anyone who is interested in this topic, whether or not they will be in Zaragoza, is also welcome to contact Gayle Volk (gayle.volk@ars.usda.gov) or Cameron Peace (cpeace@wsu.edu).