Raspberry

Raspberry is a globally-significant soft fruit crop, with increasing interest to consumers due to its versatility and health-related constituents. In this background context, it is therefore timely to consider the present and future status of the raspberry crop, particularly with the advances in the use of molecular tools and plant phenotyping to improve our understanding of improving crop quality and fruit yields. Since the 1980s a wealth of fundamental genomics and metabolomics resources have been developed for soft fruits including linkage maps, physical maps, QTLs and expression tools. However, a number of serious and emerging challenges exist for the raspberry industry, including the plants' ability to resist major pest and disease burdens and the impact of climate change on crop production, specifically water use and water availability for soft fruit crops.
This book aims to address some of these challenges by updating the information known about this important crop, its health value, the major pest and diseases which affect raspberry and approaches for their control, and the speed and precision offered by selective breeding programs by the deployment of molecular tools and linkage maps for germplasm assessment. Understanding the genetic control of commercially and nutritionally important traits and the linkage of these characteristics to molecular markers on chromosomes is the future basis of plant breeding. We will also introduce the opportunity to fast track breeding by improving the speed of phenotypic selection by utilizing imaging sensor technologies, thereby reducing the cost of years of field assessment through developing this knowledge into markers linked to key fruit traits. The chapters of this book will span the knowledge gained from the collaborations between growers, plant breeders, plant physiologists, soil scientists, geneticists, agronomists and physicists which is essential to achieve progress in improving productivity and a sustainable industry.

Dr. Julie Graham leads the Soft Fruit and Perennial Crops Group at the James Hutton Institute. Julie is a past holder of Jones Bateman Cup (2009-2011) awarded by Royal horticultural Society for outstanding contribution to soft fruit research. In the main Julies work involves formulating research hypotheses, the solutions of which lead to products and processes that aid economic sustainability, development and expansion in the UK soft fruit sector. Julie's career raison d'etre is to associate genotypic differences in traits, and trait development, with specific genes and determine the importance of these using genetic mapping approaches, genome sequencing, gene expression analyses and small mapping population/association studies. The traits that have been the focus of her research include pest and disease resistance, fruit quality, ripening, season extension, nutrition and architectural traits, sustainability in the light of changing weather patterns and primocane-fruiting. Julie's group have recently pioneered on farm real time hyperspectral imaging as a new tool linking genotype to phenotype. Julie sits on various advisory bodies and works closely with industry to ensure research leads to tangible outputs that are adopted by the sector.
Dr. Rex Brennan has worked for over 30 years as a fruit breeder at the James Hutton Institute, and has bred several commercially successful cultivars of blackcurrant. His most recent work has focused on the integration of molecular and physiological techniques into breeding strategies for fruit crops. Additionally, he has particular interests in the present and emerging effects of environmental stresses on fruit production, especially regarding winter chilling and dormancy interactions. Rex is a past holder of the Jones-Bateman Cup and is a present holder of the Scottish Horticultural Medal awarded by the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society.