Goal – Develop a rapid and reliable screening technique for resistant grape germplasm.
Activities – Compared screening methods for resistance to Eutypa dieback among nine genetically-diverse cultivars.
Results & Outputs
Merlot and Primitivo were most resistant to Eutypa dieback, based on both methods (hardwood cuttings and detached canes). However, the detached-cane method – a rapid alternative that takes only 5 weeks – differentiated cultivars similarly to the hardwood-cutting method, which is the standard in most labs.
The susceptible control, table-grape cultivar Thompson seedless, was ‘beat’ by an even more susceptible table grape cultivar, Husseine. Fortunately, this is not a commercial table grape, but it can serve as a new susceptible control in our studies.
Significant Outcomes & Impacts
The detached-cane method will serve as a phenotyping assay for use with materials from VitisGen and other grape breeding projects. In this way, our SCRI project builds on other SCRI projects that have already completed major genotyping efforts.
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