DEVELOPMENTS IN BREEDING AND TECHNIQUES WITHIN THE COMMUNITY PLANT VARIETY RIGHTS FRUIT SECTOR

The Community Plant Variety Rights (CPVR) system provides European Union-wide intellectual property protection for new plant cultivars of all botanical taxa, including inter alia hybrids between genera and species; the system is run by the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO). From its inception in 1995 until August 2003, CPVR applications have surpassed 17,700, including 978 new fruit cultivars.
Almost two thirds of fruit cultivars are for Malus Mill. (apple), Prunus persica L. Batsch (peach/nectarine) and Fragaria x ananassa Duch. (strawberry), with around 190 CPVR applications filed for each of these crops.
The technical criteria to be fulfilled for the granting of a CPVR are that the cultivar must be distinct, uniform and stable (DUS); to ascertain this an official field trial – which can last 2-5 years depending on the fruit species – is undertaken on the candidate cultivar to observe its morphological and physiological characteristics.
The use of biochemical and molecular techniques has been proposed as a possible future means to aid the examiner, or even reduce the duration of the DUS test, so that a technical report could be concluded more quickly and efficiently, particularly when mutation cultivars are in question.
Specialist working groups under the auspices of UPOV could be established to examine the potential of such techniques in certain crops.
The notion of essentially derived varieties (EDV) was established in the 1991 Act of the UPOV Convention and implemented in the legislation on CPVR; it was conceived in order to identify new cultivars predominantly derived from an initial cultivar.
Although there is no text which clearly illustrates what constitutes an EDV, two examples of these could be mutations – which are numerous in certain fruit species – and genetically modified organisms (GMO), of which very few fruit cultivars have yet been ready for commercialisation.

XI Eucarpia Symposium on Fruit Breeding and Genetics

S.F.A. Semon

distinctness, uniformity and stability, biochemical and molecular techniques, UPOV, essentially derived varieties, mutations, genetically modified organisms

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2004.663.126