Fecha de publicación: 14/12/2024 Fuente: ISHS (International Society for Horticultural Science) Post date: Saturday 14 December 2024
Author:
ISHS Secretariat

Climate change leads to unpredictable epidemiological disturbances, intensifying the multi-disease and pest challenges in fruit tree orchards, leading to significant damage and economic losses. With an urgent need to reduce the application of phytosanitary products, alternative and durable solutions must be found. As such, disease resilience is an appealing concept that still needs to be explored for fruit trees. The main objective of this PhD project is to gain key insights into disease resilience in stone fruit by exploiting genetically diverse plant material under low phytosanitary protection conditions, and by developing appropriate methodological tools to characterize its components. Based on the regular monitoring of 10 biotic stress symptoms in a peach (P. persica) and an apricot (P. armeniaca) core collection under low phytosanitary conditions in five environmentally different locations in southeastern France, we quantified the cumulative susceptibility to the multiple pests and diseases attacking fruit trees, as well as their evolution over the years. The monitoring of several ‘resilience biomarkers’ (i.e. trunk growth, flower density and fruit load) allowed us to assess the impact of the different pests and diseases on tree health and performance. Several genome-wide association models (GWAS) were tested to dissect the genetic architecture of disease resilience components. In the first approach, an individual study of each biotic stress was undertaken to: i) classify them into different typologies according to the influence of the environment and G×E interactions, and ii) identify candidate QTLs, the majority being environment-specific or interactive. Secondly, based on several multi-trait GWAS approaches, we detected co-localized peaks controlling a diverse range of pests or diseases. Finally, thanks to the development of several indexes based on the combination of disease symptoms and biomarkers, we successfully identified resilient accessions able to cope with the multiple biotic stresses imposed by low phytosanitary protection, thus fuelling the reflection on the design of resilient ideotypes. This work pioneers the exploration of resilience in stone fruit trees while providing a framework for the identification of disease resilience components. It contributes to a profound and necessary shift in breeding targets to create more resilient agricultural systems.
Marie Serrie won the ISHS Young Minds Award for the best oral presentation at the I International Symposium on Apricot and Plum in France in April 2024.
Marie Serrie, INRAE – GAFL, 67 Allée des chênes, 84143 Montfavet, France, e-mail: marie.serrie@inrae.fr
The article is available in Chronica HorticulturaeTags: stone fruitpesticide reductionCategories: Young Minds Award Winners