SCRI 2022: Applying advanced phenotypic and genomic tools to improve flavor, nutrition, and production traits in carrot

Specialty Crop Research Initiative, Award Number 2022-51181-38321, September 2022 to September 2026

Summary: Carrots are the richest source of provitamin A in the U.S. diet, one of the most widely consumed and nutritious vegetables in the world and worth $863M to U.S. growers. A survey of stakeholders revealed that the carrot industry needs breeding stocks and genomic tools that can be used to develop carrots with improved field performance including disease and pest resistance; abiotic stress tolerance to meet growing market demands; and improved flavor and nutritional quality to better meet consumer needs. To address these needs, we recently screened the national germplasm collection of around 700 diverse carrot accessions and identified new sources of genes for improving carrot productivity and quality, expanding product development, and strengthening economic viability. Improved cultivars with these traits will provide a cost-effective, environmentally favorable means to deliver an improved carrot crop to growers, processors and consumers, but carrot breeders will need tools to track genes for improving the crop, and tested breeding stocks to efficiently develop superior cultivars. Consistent with SCRI goals for breeding and genomics, outreach and economic viability for stakeholders, our goals are to: 1) Develop cost-effective genomic tools to advance carrot breeding populations with these economically and nutritionally significant traits identified by stakeholders; 2) Map genes underlying economically important traits so breeders can effectively deploy them to growers, processors and consumers; 3) Evaluate bioavailability of nutrients in carrots with varying nutrient composition that may influence nutritional impact; and 4) Evaluate the market value and impact of carrot traits on grower and consumer decisions.

• Objective 1: Develop cost-effective genomic tools to advance breeding populations and integrate loci related to economically significant traits identified by stakeholders
• Objective 2: Use multi-parental and biparental populations to map gene locations of economically important traits using optimized genomic-assisted strategies
• Objective 3: Evaluate the bioavailability of nutrients in selected breeding stocks with varying nutrient compositions that may influence bioavailability
• Objective 4: Estimate economic costs and benefits to buyers and the industry of improved traits and assess the broad societal value of these improvements

Link to project summary in the United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Current Research Information System