COLLEGE STATION — People should be able to stop and smell the roses, not spray them, said Dr. David Byrne, Texas A&M AgriLife Research rose breeder in College Station.
Byrne is part of two national specialty crop research projects aimed at toughening up roses’ ability to ward off diseases and other pestilences. He cited surveys in which the gardening public said the No. 1 desired trait is disease resistance.
“And I agree with them. That’s what I prefer,” Byrne said. “I don’t want to spray my roses.”
The first project, called RosBREED II, is a five-year effort by researchers studying a number of major fruit crops and roses. Byrne explained that the internationally loved flower is kin to apples, peaches, pears, strawberries, blackberries and cherries as part of the Rosaceae family.
Dr. David Byrne, Texas A&M AgriLife Research rose breeder, with roses in plots at Texas A&M University. He is collaborating on two national studies to develop rose varieties that are resistant to diseases such as black spot and rose rosette.
“In the fruit trees portion of that project, they’re talking about fruit quality or disease resistance,” he said. “In the roses, we’re talking about disease resistance, basically black spot.”
Byrne said researchers have longed for molecular markers that point to black spot resistant genes so they could be identified in the breeding process.
“We can use the tools that we have now basically to find tags on chromosomes that mark traits,” he said. “This helps us select the parents, because we know which ones combine best to get the maximum black spot resistance. It also helps us select some of the seedlings that are going to be best, and that helps us select seedlings quicker.”
Byrne explained that the traditional process would be to produce the seedlings, plant them in the field and then evaluate them over two or three years.
“If I had a marker that would tell me which genes a seedling had, I could select the ones that have black spot resistance in the first year, saving a couple of years,” he said. “I can do two generations with markers as fast as I can do one generation without markers.”
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