About

The life-cycles of fruit trees are closely synchronised with seasonal cycles. These seasonal patterns of growth and flowering are crucial for successful fruit production and yield. Responses to temperature and day length control these seasonal patterns. During autumn and early winter, buds and apices of fruit trees become dormant in response to low temperatures and short days. This dormancy is eventually overcome by longer exposure to cold, allowing growth to resume in spring in response to longer days and warmer temperatures. Environmental cues such as winter and spring temperatures that control these cycles are altered with climate change threatening yield. Our ability to breed new tree cultivars is hampered by our lack of knowledge of the molecular and genetic mechanisms underlying these economically important environmental responses, particularly how trees detect and respond to temperature changes.

The FruitFlow project addresses these issues for two important perennial crops: apple and peach. It aims to produce fundamental knowledge on bud dormancy and budbreak in fruit trees and to test its significance under field conditions for the development of novel technologies for predicting and promoting flower and fruit production.

Results

Steps that will be taken:

• Acquire data on the seasonal behaviour of diverse panels of apple and peach varieties.
• Identify genetic associations between the behaviour of apple and peach cultivars and polymorphisms in their genomes.
• Analyse the chemical content of apple and peach buds to identify small molecules whose appearance correlates with different stages of the dormancy cycle. Co-precipitation and computational methods will then identify the proteins that interact with these molecules.
• Test the functions of proteins identified as interacting with small molecules or from GWAS by reverse genetics or transgenic approaches.
• Test the chemicals identified as accumulating at different stages of the dormancy process for their capacity to stimulate bud break or flowering of apple and peach by direct application.