16 CapitalPress.com
August 17, 2018
OSU seeks to breed better lilacs
By DESIREE BERGSTROM
Capital Press
CORVALLIS, Ore. — The
Ornamental Plant Breeding
Program at Oregon State Uni-
versity is attempting to create
a better re-blooming lilac and
make it more blight resistant.
“We want a really good
re-bloomer,” said Ryan Con-
treras, an associate professor
of ornamental plant breeding
at OSU.
“(Lilacs) bloom in early
spring, and they bloom again
in summer,” Contreras said.
However, not all varieties re-
bloom, and the idea is to cre-
ate a variety that consistently
re-blooms.
To achieve that goal, Con-
treras said researchers have
gene-sequenced the plants
and rated them based on how
many flowers appear on each
shrub when they re-bloom.
Desiree Bergstrom/Capital Press
Desiree Bergstrom/Capital Press
Ryan Contreras is in charge of the ornamental plant breeding
program at Oregon State University.
“We crossed a plant that
does not re-bloom with a
plant that re-blooms and we
got this population. Some of
those plants re-bloom, some
of them do not. We sequenced
Crossed lilac, with blooms on
it, at OSU’s Ornamental Plant
Breeding Field Day on the Lew-
is-Brown Horticulture Research
Farm in Corvallis, Ore.
that whole population,” Con-
treras said.
“You have all of these,
what you call markers, they
are spots in the DNA” that al-
low researchers to track spe-
cific traits, he said.
They then “take the data
from which plants re-bloomed
and compare the phenotype—
what the plants look like—to
the genotype—the sequence
data,” he said. “That will al-
low us to find markers in the
genome associated with the
trait (of re-blooming).”
The project takes a signifi-
cant amount of time.
“In lilacs we probably look
at them for at least 2 years af-
ter flowering before we make
a selection,” he said. We iden-
tify ‘OK I like that plant’ and
then we make cuttings of it.”
Then they grow plants
from the cuttings.
“We evaluate those for
several years,” Contreras said.
“Then, assuming that there
is interest and a market for
them… we will release them
(to the market).”
The full observation time
of the new plants takes about
five years after flowering
starts, he said. Some plants
will take several years to start
flowering. From seed to re-
lease can take nearly a decade.
Another goal for re-
searchers is to create a more
blight-resistant plant. He said
in the region a blight called
Pseudomonas is common.
The bight causes brown
spots on leaves and young
shoots that can then grow and
turn black.
The fragrance of lilacs
makes them especially ap-
pealing to try to improve.
“Fragrant plants are al-
ways attractive; they never go
out of style,” Contreras said.
“It’s a plant that has name
recognition,” Contreras said,
as a part of the reason the pro-
gram is looking to improve
lilacs.
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