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- Author or Editor: Livia Tommasini x
- Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science x
Avocado (Persea americana) is a subtropical tree prized for its large and nutritious fruit. Although native to Mesoamerica, avocado is now grown in tropical and subtropical regions around the world, and consumer demand for avocado continues to grow at a considerable rate. Despite the appeal of avocado, its genetic improvement has been slow owing to substantial land and labor requirements combined with the fact that young trees do not produce fruit for several years and a pollination system that makes it difficult to produce genetic crosses. Molecular markers promise to accelerate the rate of breeding progress, especially for simple traits of high heritability. One of the distinguishing features of the avocado fruit is the presence of a number of compounds that have been linked to human health. As a prelude to the use of molecular markers for the improvement of nutritional traits, this article reports estimates of the heritability of carotenoids, β-sitosterol, and α-tocopherol content (the most biologically active form of vitamin E) in ripe avocado fruit. Each of these three compounds has been linked to beneficial health outcomes, and each is shown to have a sufficiently high heritability to predict successful marker-assisted selection.
The glossy, green-fleshed fruit of the avocado (Persea americana) has been the object of human selection for thousands of years. Recent interest in healthy nutrition has singled out the avocado as an excellent source of several phytonutrients. Yet as a sizeable, slow-maturing tree crop, it has been largely neglected by genetic studies, owing to a long breeding cycle and costly field trials. We use a small, replicated experimental population of 50 progeny, grown at two locations in two successive years, to explore the feasibility of developing a dense genetic linkage map and to implement quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis for seven phenotypic traits. Additionally, we test the utility of candidate-gene single-nucleotide polymorphisms developed to genes from biosynthetic pathways of phytonutrients beneficial to human health. The resulting linkage map consisted of 1346 markers (1044.7 cM) distributed across 12 linkage groups. Numerous markers on Linkage Group 10 were associated with a QTL for flowering type. One marker on Linkage Group 1 tracked a QTL for β-sitosterol content of the fruit. A region on Linkage Group 3 tracked vitamin E (α-tocopherol) content of the fruit, and several markers were stable across both locations and study years. We argue that the pursuit of linkage mapping and QTL analysis is worthwhile, even when population size is small.