The Italian Job

We all like a raspberry, strawberry or blueberry – who doesn’t? But what if we never had access to these fruits? Our climate is changing and adapting to changing environmental conditions is critical in ensuring a future supply of quality fruit crops.

The EU funded BreedingValue project (2021-2025), which has been studying the current biodiversity of these crops and identifying new pre-breeding materials to be used for the creation of new, resilient cultivars with high quality fruit held its final meeting in April in Ancona at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy. 

A team from Hutton went to present their findings and the work that has been undertaken across six unique work packages and to take part in a workshop, “Advancing Berry Breeding: From phenotyping to genomic innovation.”

It will now expand communication in the plant genetic resources (PGR) breeding consumer chain, both nationally and EU-wide, for the present and future benefit of berry breeders, nurseries, growers and consumers.

What did the BreedingValue project involve?

Large scale genotyping in both raspberry and blueberry was part of this project, giving an insight into how diverse the association mapping populations produced in both crops are. This has enabled the BioSS team to delve into genome wide association studies (GWAS) which will help to identify significant regions of interest linked to traits of economic importance. Working with partners across the BreedingValue project has led to collaborations and sharing of data that will help further develop soft fruit resources to future proof the industry.

Throughout the course of the project, we have gathered extensive data on new raspberry and blueberry populations using both hyperspectral imaging and manual phenotyping to enhance our understanding of how plant phenotypic response relates to underlying genetics. Working with partners across Europe has allowed us to enhance our phenotyping and share best practice between groups across the continent.

BreedingValue has also allowed us to increase our informatics capacity working within the soft fruit community, with a particular focus on how results from consumer preference tests are presented.  We have also been able to develop and increase the capability of Hutton tools such as GridScore and Germinate, which are now widely used within the PGR community.

All in all, we had a very useful and informative few days. With the end of the week came the latte flight back into Stanstead then more than a slight rush trying to make the Edinburgh connection to get us back home in Scotland and on the bus to Dundee.

The BreedingValue partners

BreedingValue is a 5-year €6.5 million project funded by the European Union and led by Bruno Mezzetti from the University of Ancona that includes partners from across Europe. Hutton’s involvement is led by Susan McCallum (CMS) and includes elements of blueberry, raspberry and informatics work. The wider Hutton team is comprised of Paul Shaw (ICS), Sebastian Raubach (ICS), Brezos Mateos (CMS), Dominic Williams (CMS), Kay Smith (CMS), Linzi Ross (CMS) Nikki Jennings (JHL), Avril Britten (JHL) Valeria Montano (BioSS), Philip Greenspoon (BioSS) and Linda Milne (ICS). A special thank you to the field and glasshouse teams for managing and maintaining our material as well as Finance teams for dealing with complex costings and financial reporting.

Would you like to see some photos from our trip?  Beautifully captioned!

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post are the views of the author, and not an official position of the institute or funder.