Breeding for Cold Hardiness: Searching for Genes to Improve Fruit Quality in Cold-hardy Peach Germplasm

The generation of cold-hardy cultivars with high-quality fruit has long been a goal of peach breeding programs. While progress has been made, these traits have been difficult to combine by traditional breeding methods. Both cold hardiness and fruit quality are general terms that encompass various specific traits, many of which may be quantitatively inherited. Thus, many generations of hybridization and selection are required to combine several favorable alleles for both of these characteristics. Moreover, certain aspects of cold hardiness may be physiologically or morphologically incompatible with certain aspects of fruit quality, and/or major genes responsible for certain aspects of cold hardiness may be closely linked with particular genes influencing fruit quality.