Strawberry breeding in Brazil: current momentum and perspectives

Brazil depends almost entirely on imported strawberry cultivars, which burdens production costs and results in the use of genotypes with less adaptation to the Brazilian cropping conditions. To reverse this scenario, it is necessary to strengthen strawberry breeding in Brazil. Otherwise, the country will remain dependent on imported cultivars and producers will continue to be required to collect royalties. In this context, public institutions in Brazil, such as the State University of the Midwest Parana (UNICENTRO), have been successfully conducting strawberry breeding programs, with the objective of launching cultivars in the short term. Crosses between the cultivars in use in the country, with the subsequent development and selection of seedlings, have shown to be the way to generate national genotypes better adapted to the tropical and subtropical climate conditions of Brazil. In this work, in addition to the main results obtained so far by the UNICENTRO strawberry breeding program, we report information on strawberry origin, taxonomy and phylogenetic description, genotype sensitivity to photoperiod, breeding history in Brazil, and objectives, methods, and techniques employed by the current strawberry breeding in Brazil.