Establishment and maintenance of soilless germplasm collections as a strategy for berry phenotyping and breeding processes

The soilless system is used for a double process consisting of robust phenotyping, of the available continuously implemented germplasm, often on multiple cycles during the year, and the contemporaneous breeding programs on raspberry, strawberry and blueberry, that include population development, phenotyping and genotyping for marker development for particular traits of agronomic importance. The aim of this report is to present the management strategy adopted at FEM, based on soilless techniques as a flexible and optimized system. This allows for commercial introductions to readily screen new cultivars for their attitude to the local environment and cultural system. Concerning breeding, it allows better synchronization and increased numbers of annual hybridization cycles, to improve seedling growth efficiency and to reduce - through opportune plant manipulations – the time to selection. For both purposes, it helps with evaluating the genotypes under different environmental conditions in the same period of time, optimizing growing factors like temperature, pH, water and nutrients and facilitating disease control