Pre-breeding for future challenges in Nordic apples (NORDFRUIT Apple

Our changing climate will require resilient traits to maintain production and high quality in apple. The project focuses on the facilitation of new technologies to be implemented in the Nordic apple breeding programs. Considerable efforts have been made in tree and fruit storage

diseases, and a wide range of cultivars have been genotyped and partially phenotyped in the past years. For marker validation and to support a step towards genome-informed breeding of apples in the Nordic, additional set of apple phenotypic data is being collected in 2021. Furthermore, breeder-friendly assays for scoring post-harvest quality and storage disease susceptibility will be piloted.