Monitoring of Venturia inaequalis virulences

One of the strategies that can be used to develop apple cultivars with (more) durable apple scab resistance is the pyramiding of several major genes (preferably reinforced by QTLs) in the same background. But which genes are the best suited to produce apple cultivars with durable resistance? The most interesting genes are surely those which have not been overcome by the pathogen. However also genes which have been overcome by the pathogen, but only in limited areas (limited spread of the virulence), may be used in breeding.
Unfortunately the search of this information (breakdown of a R-gene and geographic distribution of the virulent isolates) is difficult and time consuming. Moreover most of the time the reports found are not up-dated, the correctness of the data difficult to verify, and because generally different differential hosts have been used, they are difficult to compare. To solve all these problems the project “Monitoring of Venturia inaequalis virulences” has been proposed.

The project is subdivided in three parts:
1) The establishment of a large network of orchards where sets of differential hosts are planted; CLICK
2) The scoring of the plants using a defined scale and submission of the data to the curator of the project CLICK
3) The publication of the summary of the collected data through the homepage of the project CLICK