Enhanced vector toolkit for vegetable germplasm improvement

Modern crop breeding aims to incorporate useful properties (traits) from related wild plants into the varieties that consumers are more familiar with. This project aims to develop a set of biological tools that will make it an easier, cheaper and faster procedure to identify the genes in the wild plants that are responsible for producing these desired traits. The tools will be based on a common plant virus, Tobacco rattle virus (TRV), that has already been shown to be adaptable for this purpose. The project will construct improved versions of the TRV-based tools, and will then test these new tools in a range of vegetable crop plants (including pepper and tomato). Beneficial plant genes identified using these tools will be selected for incorporation into the crop improvement programmes of Enza Zaden.