Molecular Genetics and Genomics and Kiwifruit Breeding

All breeding stocks for kiwifruit improvement have been recently collected from wild populations. The 1904 accession into New Zealand gave rise to a successful cultivar, 'Hayward', after two or three generations. Crossing diverse parents one and two generations away from wild populations resulted in the cultivar 'Hort16A'. Current breeding programmes are also only a few generations from wild populations, and have investigated and utilized only a small proportion of the available genetic diversity. This is a different situation from almost all other fruit trees and vines, where novelty is mostly sought from recombination of alleles from elite cultivars and selections; that is, from a comparatively narrow genetic base many generations away from original wild populations, which may no longer exist. In Actinidia, the process of accumulating desirable combinations of alleles has just begun. Fortunately, this comes at a time when molecular genetics and genomics are rapidly evolving high-throughput and increasingly cheap protocols. Although Actinidia is a challenging genus - dioecious, polyploid, taxonomically difficult because of reticulate evolution - the process of utilizing molecular genetics and genomics to predict outputs from crosses is under way.