Project description:‘Crumbly’ fruit is a developmental disorder in red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) that results in malformed fruit with poor adherence of drupelets to one another. In terms of quality and yield, crumbly fruit has become a serious problem in the raspberry industry resulting in unsaleable fruit and waste. A microarray experiment, using pools of progeny from a segregating mapping population (Glen Moy x Latham) with either 'normal' or 'crumbly' fruit at three different fruit developmental stages ('closed'; 'open'; 'green'), identified several genes that were differentially expressed between the crumbly and non-crumbly phenotypes within three quantitative trait loci (QTL) identified. Analysis of gene function highlighted the importance of processes that compromise ovule fertilization as triggers of the crumbly fruit phenotype.
