Traditional breeding approaches are used for the development of new avocado cultivars. In these approaches, fruit/seed are selected from cultivars with favorable
traits including fruit quality. After germination, it takes 4 to10 years for the selected trees to reach a reproductive competent state and an additional 5 years to characterize each cultivar for fruit production and quality. One of the problems with the traditional breeding approach is a majority of the trees are discarded after characterization of fruit production due to unfavorable phenotypes. Therefore, traditional breeding approaches are time consuming, labor intensive and costly. The goal of this project is to implement marker-assisted selection (Collard and Mackill 2008; Tester and Langridge 2010) to identify avocado varieties with improved nutritional traits at the seedling stage. Previous research had identified molecular and biochemical markers that predict high
carotenoid, beta-sitosterol and vitamin E content. The goal of this grant is to select for genotypes enriched in these nutrients in order to develop new cultivars that can be marketed for their health-related benefits.
