Recently, I had the honor of visiting Vance Whitaker and his team and viewing the University of Florida strawberry breeding program based just south of Tampa, FL. Whitaker and assistant breeder Cheryl Dalid showed me several of the newest varieties released from the program, including ‘Ember’ and ‘Encore’. These new advances continue to support and build the Florida strawberry industry, which is largely based on UF variety developments.
FROM MARKERS TO MAINSTREAM BREEDING
In 2019, I featured Whitaker in a column for American Fruit Grower where he explained how his program was implementing new breeding technologies. He provided detail to me on how marker- assisted selection had been fully implemented in his program in collaboration with Seonghee Lee, and he was expanding the use of genomic selection in his program approach to crossing and selection. My goal was to try to explain technologies for a broad audience and grow in my understanding of the new advances also…