Jan 14, 2009
Apple Varieties Coming Soon from Washington Breeders

During the hospitality hour before the annual banquet, two important figures in the Washington horticulture industry offered a treat to visitors – an opportunity to taste promising new apples not yet released as varieties.

On one side of the hall was Bruce Barritt, who retired last summer after a career in which he started the apple-breeding program at Washington State University in 1994 and raised it to prominence among the five or six such programs at land-grant universities. On this evening, he and some colleagues were slicing a pretty apple, an elite selection that tasted like you’d expect if you knew its parents. It was pinkish red, crunchy, juicy and sweet/tart, as a child of Honeycrisp and Pink Lady should be.

On the other side of the hall was Kate Evans, hired last summer to take over from Barritt. She was slicing four different apples and enticing visitors to fill out a form giving their evaluation of these potential varieties.

It will be 10 to 15 years before her breeding work results in any new varieties, she said, so much of her early effort will be in selecting, naming and releasing varieties developed by Barritt. Such work takes a long time. In Barritt’s case, for example, he never released a new variety in the 14 years he worked at it – but part of the excitement at the tasting was sampling apples that will be released soon.

Evans said one would have “trees in the ground in 2010,” but that the university has not yet decided on a name or how the release will be made. Will it be a public variety, as is Honeycrisp, or will it be a club variety, like SweeTango, both products of breeding at the University of Minnesota?

Barritt left behind nine elite lines, Evans said, meaning they survived the initial selection process and also made it through second-stage trials. Growers at four locations are evaluating them now in their orchards.

Barritt’s breeding focused on texture, Evans said, and in recent years new tools have helped. Not only does Honeycrisp have a unique texture, the gene for that texture has been associated with a marker so a seedling can be identified as having firmness, or not, without waiting years for the fruit.

Evans also will benefit from the efforts of her new colleagues at Washington State University – Amit Dhingra, Cameron Peace and Dorrie Main – and Yanmin Zhu at USDA. Dhingra said the researchers at WSU are engaged in a genomic project that will map the entire genetic structure of the apple within the next year or two. He also uses techniques that can generate a flower from an apple cell in seven weeks – another way of speeding up the breeding process. There’s no need to wait five years for a seedling to produce an apple.

Barritt’s work at WSU laid the foundation for the breeding program Evans is now joining. It relies not on one apple breeder, but a team of them. Barritt came to WSU in 1969, after obtaining his doctorate at Cornell University. Working first with breeding of small fruit, he began traveling and observing apples in the 1980s and became a leading force in apple orchard design and management before formally starting the WSU apple-breeding program in 1994.

Evans hails from the United Kingdom and, most recently, from a town carrying one of the most famous names in apples, East Malling. She is not an academic in the usual sense.

“I haven’t been with a university since getting my doctorate in 1991,” she said.

For the last 16 years, she worked at East Malling Research and directed a privately funded international breeding program called the East Malling Apple and Pear Breeding Club. Her goal was to breed new varieties from parents such as Braeburn and Gala, shifting away from the Cox Orange Pippin that had become almost a monoculture in the United Kingdom. In much of her work, she focused on incorporating disease and pest resistance into rootstocks, as well as scions.

The breeding club released one new apple rootstock, M.116, which she described as somewhat vigorous, like M.106, but with “important resistances” to collar rots, replant diseases and wooly apple aphids. Its major opportunity in the UK is as a rootstock for hard-cider varieties, which are grown quite differently from fresh-market varieties. Cider apple trees are much taller, and fruit is either shaken or allowed to fall to the ground at harvest.

She also released a quince rootstock, EM H, that is used as a rootstock to dwarf pears.

How does a researcher prepare a breeding program that will somehow anticipate market needs 15 years down the road?

“Obviously, we have to develop a range of things,” she said, “different colors and flavors and types. When marketers decide what they want, we will have varieties to release to them.”

Evans came to the United States with her husband, Peter Smytheman, an entomologist now with the Washington Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center. He was previously technical manager of BCP Certis, a European company specializing in biological pest control products.




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