How the strawberry breeding program at UC Davis is cultivating ‘the

next best strawberry’

UC Davis’s selectively bred, high-quality strawberry varieties are used in approximately 60% of the world’s strawberry production

BY LYNN CHEN features@theaggie.org

A customer visiting the supermarket most likely has no second thoughts while picking up their usual carton of strawberries. They may glance here and there for any under ripe ones, but then they move on to the next item on their list. However, getting those strawberries into a shopping cart is a surprisingly long, complex and scientific process, designed to perfectly cater to consumer taste buds. Everything begins with the development of a quality strawberry variety, an area of expertise at the Strawberry Breeding Program at UC Davis.

Researchers at the Strawberry Breeding Program have been breeding commercially useful varieties of strawberries since 1952. The program is currently housed in the Department of Plant Sciences in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and includes a teaching component for UC Davis students to learn hands-on. Varieties developed here at UC Davis constitute about 60% of the strawberries consumed worldwide.

In order to develop high-quality strawberries for growers, researchers at the program enhance different key traits of the berries, such as disease resistance, aroma, flavor and post-harvest traits like firmness, which are important for packaging and shipping.

“Disease resistance is a big one,” Dominique Pincot, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher with the program said. “There are so many different diseases that are of concern for growers.”

In recent years, a disease on growers’ radar was the Fusarium wilt, a soil-borne disease that, as the name implies, causes wilt in strawberry plants, according to Glenn Cole, a staff research associate.

“Fusarium was a disease that [took] off the last 10 years and even more rapidly in the last few years,” Cole said. “The disease started to pick up because a lot of acres are grown with susceptible varieties.”

According to Mitchell Feldmann, Ph.D., an assistant professor of strawberry genetics at UC Davis and direct-elect of the breeding program, the spread of the Fusarium pathogen was originally combated by the fumigant methyl bromide. However, in 2005, the product was banned by California legislation.

“Methyl bromide was a huge tool that protected strawberries against a ton of pathogens,” Feldmann said.

“Unfortunately, it’s also a really bad greenhouse gas and carcinogen.”

A year after the ban on methyl bromide, Fusarium spread from the soil, causing increasing cases of wilt in strawberries. It even led to concerns that a Fusarium epidemic could destroy the strawberry crop in California. Fortunately though, in mid-April this year, UC Davis announced the release of five new strawberry varieties, or cultivars: UC Eclipse, UC Golden Gate, UC Keystone, UC Monarch and UC Surfline — the first to be resistant to the deadly fungal disease.

“It was critical for us to release this current set of varieties to address the [Fusarium],” Cole said. “There have been other products on the market with Fusarium resistance, but they’re older genetics, so they don’t yield as well. Growers have started to move away from those varieties, and so we need to have a new set of higher-yielding varieties that are more relevant for today’s market.”

Other than having high yield rates whether they want a single, double or triple room, what their budget for housing is, if they’re going to be living in a freshman Living-Learning or Shared-Interest Community and so on. There’s also a personality quiz where users can say how clean they are, how often they plan to be home, how close they want to be with their roommate, if they snore, if they smoke, if they drink, what their study/ party preferences are and so on. Matches can message each other in-app, and the log-in process is built to verify that users are UC Davis students.

According to Sadeed Adnan, a fourth-year computer science and economics double major and the director of product at AggieWorks, RoomU isn’t actually the only technology project that AggieWorks has designed this year. They have designed three different platforms, all geared toward addressing students’ needs.

“The first is [RoomU…],” Adnan said. “The second is Club Finder, which is a personalized platform where students can discover, organize and manage club information. The third app is a marketplace app which allows students to buy and sell products.”

Kent Williams, a fourth-year computer science and engineering major and the director of engineering for AggieWorks, said that he wanted to highlight the “by students for students” mentality of the group.

“Not only was this built with the UC Davis campus in mind, but all of this was built by UC Davis students; all of our engineers and designers and the leadership in AggieWorks are all Davis students,” Williams said. “We’re trying to do something to serve our Davis community.”

Tran expressed that she is looking forward to seeing RoomU being used by students in the coming month and said that she hopes this is just the start of a bigger change to the way roommate matching is done.

“We really think that this is the future of how roommate searching should be,” Tran said. “We don’t think it should be that difficult, or take 20+ messages to future roommates. We’re really excited to see this come alive on campus.”

RoomU is currently available on the Google Play Store for Android users and the App Store for iPhone users.

Davis’ beloved Turtle House Co-op through the eyes of its newest hatchlings

Finding community within Davis housing co-ops and resistance to Fusarium wilt, the new varieties also have improved flavor and characteristics that enable year-round growing in California. According to Feldmann, the new varieties are tailored to grow in various regions that belong to three different market segments distinguished by temperature and daylight hours, including fall-planted, short-day varieties; fall-planted, dayneutral varieties; and summer-planted, day-neutral varieties.

Developing these strawberry cultivars was no easy task. To find plants that had the Fusarium wilt, the team at the Strawberry Breeding Program had to obtain and analyze the DNA of thousands of plants in a fiveacre strawberry selection nursery. In September, new breeding crosses are planted in the field, and these seedlings grow throughout the winter until they begin to flower and fruit in spring. It is during this time that Cole collects data on the new experimental varieties.

“When fruiting begins, I walk the fields and make phenotypic or visual observations for different trait qualities for the strawberry varieties that we’re trying to develop,” Cole said.

This process has been made faster through genetic tools such as markers.

“Instead of picking fruit from 10,000 plants, we can pick fruit from 2,000 plants because we know which ones have the traits we want,” Cole said.

Breeding strawberries does not end with the development of immunity to one disease, though.

BY YASMEEN O’BRIEN features@theaggie.org

On a morning stroll past 217 2nd St. in Davis, CA, your eyes wander before you can catch them. The bold shamelessly crane their necks while the timid sneak glimpses through calculated side-eye. As the white picket fence enclosing the front yard unexpectedly conjures an image of the 1950’s American Dream, your gaze curiously travels onward, enticed by the colors and beauty of the big blue house.

Along the edges of unkempt grass, the yard is lined with bicycles, flower beds, trash cans, art pieces, tables and chairs. Soft ukulele strumming drifts past the fence and echoes through the trees. A metal turtle hangs from the roof like the mermaid of a ship’s bow while an armless statue presides over the front gate, wearing an elf hat and a T-shirt showing a lion with dreadlocks.

Among these happenings, a small barefooted group diverse in age, ethnicity and gender stare back at you smiling and waving from their spot on the porch steps, soaking in the early sun.

This group belong to the Turtle House Co-op: currently home to 18 residents, 15 of which are UC Davis students. Housing co-ops — or democratically controlled corporations that are established to provide affordable housing for its members — are popular in Davis, with Turtle House and the Davis Tri Co-ops being notable examples.

Turtle House frequently hosts events open to the public such as live music shows, clothing swaps and open mic nights. Although a tight-knit community, they strive to welcome all with opening arms.

“We share a lot of things. I get a lot of free clothes and free opportunities,” one resident, also known as a Turtle, said. “This is so much fun, this is exactly where I want to be.”

One evening, the aptly named Sierra Goodfriend wrapped me in a hug and enthusiastically welcomed me into the bedroom she shares with Katie Hostetler. Their door opens to the front porch where items littered across a large metal table invite images of late-night conversations, jam sessions and even play readings. An impossibly thick and slightly water-damaged copy of “William Shakespeare: The Complete Works” opened and book-marked to “Henry V” is responsible for the last image.

Goodfriend shared that while she feels close to her fellow Turtles, 14 of the 18 residents are newcomers so they are still in the process of getting to know each other deeply. Both Goodfriend and Hostetler have lived at the house for five months and praise the community of warm, artistic and open-minded people they have come to know as their family.

Draped in warmly glowing string lights, Turtle House at night resembles a person dressed up for a special occasion. Art and flowers adorn its exterior walls and yard. Hammocks sway like locks of hair over plants bursting with life.

One thing’s for sure: this house has a mysterious past, or at least a widely unknown one. And the large number of newcomers can’t help with this lack of knowledge. They’ve all heard whispers of origin stories, but no one is certain — although I heard a resident named Joe knows all.

“Apparently it used to be a boarding school for boys like a hundred years ago,” Hostetler said. “Maybe that’s wrong, I don’t know.” Goodfriend giggled, “Could be.”