Articles
Molecular tools for S breeding to obtain a sustainable healthy snack
Article number
1442_29
Pages
225 – 232
Language
English
Abstract
Public opinion is increasingly attentive to the sustainability of food products and often properly suggests that fresh fruits should not be processed for ready-to-eat packaging since they already have their natural packaging.
Nonetheless, fresh fruit consumption requires preparative steps not always compatible with the places and times of modern food consumption.
Therefore, fresh cut ready-to-eat snacks are encountering a growing market share and are commonly recognized as a concrete healthy alternative to junk food.
A good compromise for conjugation of sustainability, healthy life style promotion and fast food consumption is represented by baby fruits, to be eaten without peeling and in one bite.
In this kind of products, oxidative processes usually determined by the fresh cut are simply avoided so that a very sustainable packaging can be adopted.
Besides, small seedless fruits can be a good option for children’s nutrition.
Small sized pears, pears with edible peels, seedless pears and pears with deciduous calyx were already available among traditional Italian cultivars, but all these traits are to be pyramided in a single cultivar to produce really attractive baby pears.
In the present work, a list of 34 locally spread genotypes and traditional cultivars from Campania was evaluated for the selection of these traits and for cross inter-compatibility.
In particular, fruit dimensions, peel thickness and rustiness, calix deciduousness, ripening period, flowering period, locus S asset were scored and the best two parental combinations were evidenced and tested for breeding programs.
These were ‘Arnaldo’ × ‘San Vito’ and ‘San Vito’ × ‘Coscia Cilentana’, that combined the particularly small size of the ‘San Vito’ cultivar with desirable peeling related traits and a more late ripening of the other two selected cultivars.
For these two crosses, idoneous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were retrieved by ddRAD resequencing and selected for the progeny characterization.
Four groups of SNPs were pointed out so that they were heterozygous in the male parent and homozygous in the female and vice-versa in both of the two crosses.
These four groups included respectively 3824 (HOM S. Vito/HET Arnaldo), 971 (HET S. Vito/HOM Arnaldo), 1046 (HET S. Vito/HOM Coscia Cilentana) and 4801 SNPs (HOM S. Vito/HET Coscia Cilentana), each mapped on a specific position of the 17 pear chromosomes.
The selected SNPs were almost uniformly distributed on the chromosomes and can be subsequently selected, based on their position, for monitoring specific already mapped traits.
Traditional breeding schemes for pear require a long time planning for progeny growing and selection.
Therefore, molecular information here collected can be considered as an important step for speeding up progeny selection as well as for the molecular investigation of traits to be modified by assisted evolution techniques.
Nonetheless, fresh fruit consumption requires preparative steps not always compatible with the places and times of modern food consumption.
Therefore, fresh cut ready-to-eat snacks are encountering a growing market share and are commonly recognized as a concrete healthy alternative to junk food.
A good compromise for conjugation of sustainability, healthy life style promotion and fast food consumption is represented by baby fruits, to be eaten without peeling and in one bite.
In this kind of products, oxidative processes usually determined by the fresh cut are simply avoided so that a very sustainable packaging can be adopted.
Besides, small seedless fruits can be a good option for children’s nutrition.
Small sized pears, pears with edible peels, seedless pears and pears with deciduous calyx were already available among traditional Italian cultivars, but all these traits are to be pyramided in a single cultivar to produce really attractive baby pears.
In the present work, a list of 34 locally spread genotypes and traditional cultivars from Campania was evaluated for the selection of these traits and for cross inter-compatibility.
In particular, fruit dimensions, peel thickness and rustiness, calix deciduousness, ripening period, flowering period, locus S asset were scored and the best two parental combinations were evidenced and tested for breeding programs.
These were ‘Arnaldo’ × ‘San Vito’ and ‘San Vito’ × ‘Coscia Cilentana’, that combined the particularly small size of the ‘San Vito’ cultivar with desirable peeling related traits and a more late ripening of the other two selected cultivars.
For these two crosses, idoneous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were retrieved by ddRAD resequencing and selected for the progeny characterization.
Four groups of SNPs were pointed out so that they were heterozygous in the male parent and homozygous in the female and vice-versa in both of the two crosses.
These four groups included respectively 3824 (HOM S. Vito/HET Arnaldo), 971 (HET S. Vito/HOM Arnaldo), 1046 (HET S. Vito/HOM Coscia Cilentana) and 4801 SNPs (HOM S. Vito/HET Coscia Cilentana), each mapped on a specific position of the 17 pear chromosomes.
The selected SNPs were almost uniformly distributed on the chromosomes and can be subsequently selected, based on their position, for monitoring specific already mapped traits.
Traditional breeding schemes for pear require a long time planning for progeny growing and selection.
Therefore, molecular information here collected can be considered as an important step for speeding up progeny selection as well as for the molecular investigation of traits to be modified by assisted evolution techniques.
Authors
A. Nunziata, E. Ferrara, D. Cice, D. Gentile, G. Capriolo, M. Petriccione
Keywords
baby pears, ready-to-eat, locus S
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