Binding blueberry breeders

摘要

Consumers want to buy blueberries for their healthful properties, but they often discover that berry quality can be inconsistent from purchase to purchase. The blueberry industry needs cultivars that not only possess good fruit quality characteristics— including size, color, flavor, firmness and shelf life — but will express those characteristics over and over again, said Massimo Iorizzo, associate professor of plant genetics at North Carolina State University.Iorizzo leads the Vaccinium Coordinated Agricultural Project, VacCAP, a new effort to improve the quality of Vaccinium fruit (which includes blueberry and cranberry) by bringing together researchers in the fields of breeding, genetics, food science and socioeconomics. The project's chief goal is to find the fruit characteristics that consumers like, to understand the genetics behind those characteristics, and to develop a breeding framework around them, Iorizzo said.