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CapitalPress.com
July 29, 2016
Quest for the best apple
Kate Evans leads most advanced apple breeding program in world
By DAN WHEAT
Capital Press
WENATCHEE, Wash. —
When Kate Evans was a little
girl in Shefield, England, she
enjoyed pulling apart plants in
her parents’ garden.
She was seeing how they
were made. She was looking
for lower and leaf buds.
“My parents were ine with
it. We had lots of lowers.
There were enough to spare,”
she says with a smile.
Forty years later, she’s de-
veloped and manages what is
arguably the most advanced
apple breeding program in
the world. It’s the irst to use
DNA testing for fruit quality,
in other words aimed at the
best irmness, crispness, juic-
iness, lavor, sweetness and
storability of apples.
Some European apple
breeding programs were irst
in applying DNA testing to
disease resistance, she said.
Evans came to the Wash-
ington State University Tree
Fruit Research and Extension
Center in Wenatchee sev-
en years ago as an associate
professor of horticulture and
pome fruit (fruit produced
by lowering plants) breeder
and head of the center’s apple
breeding program. She suc-
ceeded Bruce Barritt who re-
tired and had started the pro-
gram 14 years earlier.
Evans had her doctorate in
plant molecular biology and
had spent 16 years leading
apple and pear breeding pro-
grams for East Malling Re-
search, in England.
When she arrived in
Wenatchee, the center’s apple
breeding program was just
heading toward DNA testing.
“It was in its absolute in-
fancy, so a lot of the work I’ve
focused on is how to use that
technology to develop the lo-
gistics of the application be-
cause it has to be 100 percent
accurate regarding the trace-
ability of the data to the indi-
vidual seedlings,” she said.
“When you use the data,
you remove or throw away
the seedling. So it’s termi-
nal selection. If you make a
mistake and throw away the
wrong one, you’ve wasted ev-
erything,” she said.
DNA testing is done at
seedling selection stage and
prior to that in selecting
the most efficient parent
combinations to produce
Kate Evans
Age: 49
Born and raised: Shefield,
England
Family: Husband, Peter
Smytheman, entomologist
and research intern WSUT-
FREC. Children: Thomas, 16;
Chloe, 1
Education: Bachelor’s
degree in genetics and plant-
biology, Leeds University;
doctorate in plant molecular
biology, Durham University
Occupation: Associate
professor of horticulture and
pome fruit breeder, WSU Tree
Fruit Research and Extension
Center, Wenatchee, Wash.
desired characteristics.
Previously, parents were
chosen for their general fruit
and tree characteristics, but
with DNA genetic markers
parents can be better selected
AI.OW16-4/#6
Dan Wheat/Capital Press
Kate Evans, Washington State University apple breeder, looks
at fruit from breeding selections at the WSU Tree Fruit Research
and Extension Center in Wenatchee. The apples came out of cold
storage and were brought to room temperature for a week before
being measured for irmness, crispness, lavor and juiciness.
to reduce the number of poor
progeny. A genetic marker is
a gene or short sequence of
DNA that’s a good indicator
of a speciic trait or character-
istic.
“You can have markers for
single traits, markers for mul-
tiple traits and several mark-
ers for the same trait. Not
often is a trait controlled by a
single gene,” she said.
“We know acidity is pre-
dominately controlled by
two major genes, but for
other more complicated
characteristics the DNA tests
only explain a portion of the
overall characteristic,” Ev-
ans said.
A lot of research is going
into identifying more DNA
markers. But it is slow work.
The USDA-funded Ros-
BREED project led by genet-
icists Amy Lezzoni, professor
of plant breeding at Michigan
State University and Cameron
Peace, associate professor of
horticulture at WSU in Pull-
man, is making progress.
Quality and storability are
the overriding targets of the
WSU apple breeding pro-
gram. Producers want fruit
that pleases consumers and
stores well for year-long sales.
More speciically, Ev-
ans uses DNA testing to aim
for desired levels of lavor
or sweetness versus tartness
(sugar versus acidity), irm-
ness, texture and ripening.
It takes about 18 years
from crossing parents for hy-
brid seed to reach commercial
release of a new variety.
“The DNA technology is
more focused on eficiency
than speed, but in ive years
we may be at a point of hav-
ing suficient DNA markers
for important characteristics
that we will be able to take
out one of the selection phases
and save three to four years,”
Evans said.
Three new varieties were
released from the program
in recent years, all from Bar-
ritt’s breeding. WA 2 didn’t
gain traction in the industry
because there was no com-
mercial name and companies
were leery of marketing a va-
riety that could end up with
multiple names. WA 5 had
some long-term storability
issues.
WA 38, released over the
past several years, was given
the name Cosmic Crisp by
WSU in 2014. Proprietary Va-
riety Management, a Yakima
company that specializes in
variety management, is assist-
ing WSU with the apple.
Nurseries budded trees
this past fall and there may
be 500,000 trees, instead of
300,000, divvied out to grow-
ers by lottery for planting
in the spring of 2017, Evans
said.
This story originally ap-
peared Nov. 27, 2015.