Physiology

Arguably the most important advance in the last 100 years of strawberry breeding was the incorporation of the perpetual flowering locus. This single genetic locus allows production of fruit almost year-round, functionally doubling yield. Despite the agronomic importance of this trait and longstanding interest, the gene underlying it has remained mysterious. Ongoing work in the lab is using fine-mapping, RNA seq, and transgenic and CRISPR approaches to answer this question.