Project Number: 6618-21000-013-13
Project Type: Reimbursable

Start Date: Oct 01, 2008
End Date: Jun 30, 2009

Objective:
The purpose of this project is to develop methods for accelerating flowering and fruiting in citrus to permit earlier evaluation of fruit quality and enhance both efficiency and rapidity of developing improved citrus varieties.

Approach:
Train citrus seedlings and rootstocks on high-density plant-support structure. These will be used to test components of a reported system for accelerating maturation of citrus seedlings to increase efficiency in plant improvement. Individual components tested will include budding onto mature rootstocks, rapid growth of a single shoot/plant, girdling, thorn removal, and use of GA biosynthesis inhibitors. Parallel with tests to enhance system efficiency, the same components will be used to accelerate high throughput evaluation of fruit quality from the USHRL breeding program.