Advocating a need for suitable breeding approaches to boost integrated pest management: a European perspective.

Currently, European farmers do not have access to sufficient numbers and diversity of crop species/varieties. This prevents them from designing cropping systems more resilient to abiotic and biotic stresses. Crop diversification is a key lever to reduce pest (pathogens, animal pests and weeds) pressures at all spatial levels from fields to landscapes. In this context, plant breeding should consist of: (1) increased efforts in the development of new or minor crop varieties to foster diversity in cropping systems, and (2) focus on more resilient varieties showing local adaptation. This new breeding paradigm, called here 'breeding for integrated pest management (IPM)', may boost IPM through the development of cultivars with tolerance or resistance to key pests, with the goal of reducing reliance on conventional pesticides. At the same time, this paradigm has legal and practical implications for future breeding programs, including those targeting sustainable agricultural systems. By putting these issues into the context, this article presents the key outcomes of a questionnaire survey and experts' views expressed during an EU workshop entitled 'Breeding for IPM in sustainable agricultural systems'. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.

Fruit plant germplasm characterisation using molecular markers generated in RAPD and ISSR-PCR.

The genotypes of the strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa), apple (Malus domestica) and Ribes species (R. nigrum, R. rubrum and R. glossularia), maintained in our Institute's collection and used in breeding programs, were screened for DNA markers. Twenty primers for RAPD (among 60 tested) and seven for ISSR (among 10 tested) were chosen as creating polymorphic DNA bands differentiating the investigated genotypes. Based on those identity markers, the genetic distance between genotypes was determined, and their relatedness was estimated. In many cases, both RAPD- and ISSR-based genetic similarity confirmed relatedness connected with biological origin and with the place where the cultivar was developed. However, some diversity connected with the technique used for molecular marker generation was observed. Generally, the similarity values based on ISSR data were higher than those based on RAPD. Parallel study using two data sets seems to enable a reduction in the number of potential mistakes connected with each method's, technical limitations and ensures more precise relatedness determination.