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cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and it's another opportunity for you to share in the discovery here at your public land-grant research university. Tonight, we get to have a remarkable, splendid story about the culture and agriculture of Wisconsin. We're going to hear about the history and breeding of cranberries. There aren't a whole lot of native North American plants that have become commercialized as fruit crops, and cranberries is one of them. Tonight we have Brandon Schlautman here from the UW-Madison Department of Horticulture to share with you some of the stories and some of the research that he's involved with. Brandon is from Lincoln, Nebraska. It's on US 6.

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O Avenue or O Street? >> O Street. >> O Street. O Street is a lot like a place you would like to go to if you're in a college town. He went to Nebraska Wesleyan University, which is also in Lincoln, as an undergrad, and now he's here as a grad student working in the Department of Horticulture under Juan Zalapa, who's the new researcher in cranberries, both with the USDA and the Department of Horticulture. I'm looking forward to his talk. I got to hear it last week. It's always great to have a preview. I think you're in for a treat tonight just like cranberries are a treat this time of year. Please join me in welcoming Brandon to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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>> Well, thank you, everyone, for this opportunity to speak to you tonight. I grew up in Nebraska so the most that I really knew about cranberries growing up I learned from these two guys.

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If you've seen these two guys, they're on most of the Ocean Spray commercials these days. And growing up in Nebraska, I didn't know that much about cranberries, and specifically I kind of had the misconception still that cranberries grew in water. And since I was from Nebraska, I didn't really think cranberries could ever become a part of the state because our largest body of water was coming out of the central irrigation pivots going around in circles on farms all over the state. But one of the many things I've learned so far is that cranberries in fact grow on dry land, like most of our important crops. Taking this new information, I believe that my dad and I established the first cranberry test plots in Nebraska this year, and you can see it's on dry land. If you look really closely, there's these two little red dots, and those are actually cranberries.

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And I intend to keep learning information during my time here in Madison so that we can improve our yield, and even double or triple our yield each year.

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To begin my talk, I want to start with a very nice quote by Paul Eck in a book he authored in 1990 about the American cranberry. And he writes that, "There can be little argument about where this little red berry's place should be in American history, but that of the most American of all fruits and berries." And as I've research and learned about the history of cranberry growing and production in the US, I realized that this statement is in fact very true. Cranberries are one of the few native crops, native fruit crops from North America that are commercialized. The other three most important native fruit crops that are commercialized, the other two are blueberries and also the Concord grapes. But cranberries were kind of the first fruit to be domesticated, commercialized, and exported globally. I want to talk a little bit about its distribution. Cranberries are native to North America. As you can see from this map, we have actually two species of cranberries. We have Vaccinium macrocarpon, and that's the species that's grown commercially by farmers here in Wisconsin and all across the US. And it has a native distribution that's kind of centralized and eastern US, going southwards into the Appalachian Mountains and covering all of Wisconsin and a little bit of Minnesota. There's also a second species, Vaccinium oxycoccus, and it's also a cranberry except for it has smaller fruit. It's known as the small-fruited cranberry, and it's not commercialized or grown on any large scale. Cranberries were important before colonization began, and Native Americans used them in all sorts of ways. They used the color of the fruit to dye their clothing. They used them as food. And one interesting thing that some Native Americans used them for is something that a lot of them called pemmican. Pemmican can be thought of kind of like the first power bar. So what they would do is boil the berries down, mix them with different meats and fats and nuts, and after it dried out, the acid of the cranberries was great for preserving those fats and those meats for long-term use so they could take them with them traveling, have a bite of their power bar and keep on doing their daily tasks. Another important way that Native Americans viewed cranberries was as medicine. I want to talk to you a little bit about cranberries as food and medicine. And when the first colonists arrived, this concept of medicine was very important. Many of them had just arrived from these transatlantic voyages that could take months depending on the winds and the weather. And if you've watched any pirate movies, a lot of them talk about scurvy, which is a lack of vitamin C. Cranberries are a very important source of vitamin C when they arrived and especially because the way the fruit is formed they preserve for a long time. So they can be picked in the fall, and they can last all winter without really rotting or having any problems. Recently, we're learning more about how cranberries can act as medicines, and studies have shown that they have all these really cool phytochemical properties. One of them is anthocyanins, and anthocyanins are antioxidants so they've become important nutritional components of our diets. Cranberries also have flavonoids, proanthocyanidins which have been linked to the prevention of urinary tract infections which is one of the reasons that a lot of people can choose to drink cranberry juice. We also have condensed tannins, low molecular weight phenolic acids, and multiple studies have shown how cranberries can be used to improve the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the urinary tract, the digestive system, our teeth, and act as general anti-cancer prevention agents. I want to show you this painting that I came across while learning about cranberries and their history, and this painting is by Eastman Johnson, completed in 1880, and it's titled "The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket." I think this depicts a really neat part of American history. And you can see these early colonists, each day, each year there would be an important day where they would all kind of go out into the meadows and the marshes and pick wild cranberries. This was an important source not only of the vitamins and the nutrients and the calories that cranberries would provide, but cranberries have had an important economic value. They were traded globally by now. They're shipped on ships on these voyages across the oceans. And so they had quite a good value. And, in fact, harvesting these wild cranberries was so important that in Wisconsin there was a law that was passed that forbid anyone from picking or having cranberries in their possession before September 20th each year. The reason for this was that they did have a very important, they were important for the colonists. They were a fruit that would last all winter and provide a consistent source of vitamins and calories. And also they gained premium value in global markets because of those properties. Domestication and cultivation. Henry Hall is attributed as being the first person to really practice agriculture in really growing cranberries, and that occurred somewhere around 1816 near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And what that really was involved in was he went out into the neighboring meadows near his home, picked wild vines that produced the best fruit, and just transplanted them at his house so he didn't have to go searching as far, I suppose. But as he experimented growing these vines at his home, he learned quite a bit, and people started catching on to his ideas and cultivation quickly spread throughout Massachusetts and the east coast. One of the most important discoveries that Henry Hall made was that cranberries liked sand for some reason. And the reason that is is because cranberries have a growth habit where they produce these things called runners. And the runners are actually stolons, kind of like strawberries if you're familiar with how they grow. They send out these stolon vines that when they go across the sand, the sand is fine enough that they can produce roots in the vine and produce new upright stems that are reproductive and can produce berries. And so sanding has been an important practice in cranberry agriculture from the beginning. Here's an old image of a grower spreading sand on his cranberry bed. And this image also displays something where growers flood the cranberry beds in the winter, and they freeze solid. And that's kind of a way to protect the vines from the harsh weather that we experience here in Wisconsin. The ice kind of acts as like a greenhouse and keeps the vines warm underneath it, and at the same time it provides a nice surface to drive on to put the sand on so you don't mess up your vines. On Wisconsin. In 1853, cranberry cultivation began near Berlin, Wisconsin, and is thought to have been by George Pfeffer. And by 1869, cranberry production had become very, very important. Over 1,000 acres were already being cultivated, producing over a million pounds of cranberries each year. These cranberries were shipped to Chicago and ports along the Great Lakes and eventually around the world. And, at the time, that was worth $120,000 annually, those thousand acres were producing. And to think about the economic that just that small acreage of cranberries had, that was equivalent to producing 12,000 acres of wheat at the time or 40,000 barrels of apples. So they're a high value crop. Cranberry agriculture was not easy, though. The tools that they had were inventive, but they didn't make their jobs very easy. This is one of the most important tools of early cranberry growing called the cranberry scoop. And you can see the scoop kind of has these little teeth. They're combs and what they would do is they would just kind of take those combs and run them through the vines, and when they pull them up, the berries would pop off the vines and then there's kind of a little scoop bucket in the bottom that allows them to collect the berries and pour it in whatever container they're using. To look at that, you have to crawl on your hands and knees across the bed, running your scoop over and over again until you fill your bucket up. And I liked this next image. So I titled it cranberry boxes. You can see that they're eventually filling these boxes with cranberries and loading them onto the horse-drawn wagon. But if you look at the expansiveness of this cranberry bed, this is in 1904, and so you can imagine how many people it takes to harvest all these berries, and how much hand labor it really, really involves. That was an important part of cranberry. Cranberries employed a lot of people traditionally because of how labor intensive they were. Another important part was sorting the cranberries. And the image on the left you can see is Bailey's cranberry screening equipment. And it was invented in the late 1800s, 1895. And this, basically, you ran your cranberries through that There were fans in there that would blow the leaves out that you had collected while you were picking them. And there's also other mechanisms to sort out the rotting berries. And after they would run through these screening equipment, they often had women that would sit on these conveyor belts and look for bad berries. They would pick out the off-colored ones or the ones that had visible defects in order to make sure that the berries that were going to be consumed were the best ones possible. Initiating cranberry research. So, by the early 1900s, American and American government was realizing that cranberry agriculture had become a big deal. And on the left you can see kind of a neat little manuscript that says that in 1902 and 1903 the legislature of the state of Wisconsin passed a bill to put money aside to begin an experimental station especially for cranberry research in the state of Wisconsin. On the right you can see that the same thing was happening in Massachusetts. There's a letter here by EE Shaw, a grower in Massachusetts, that says, "Dear sirs, I shipped during the cranberry season of 1908 and 1909 around 1200 barrels of cranberries, and I'm going to donate one cent from each barrel to put towards establishing a research station in the state of Massachusetts." So, by the early 1900s, cranberry growing was important, and they realized that the growers could benefit from scientific research aimed specifically to improve the cranberry agriculture. So, why breed cranberries? And I think this is a really interesting question. Plant breeding, although it kind of seemed new, it's in the news a lot these days, cranberry breeding, or breeding any plant, is basically improving the plants that are available. Improving them for the growers, helping them grow the plants, and also improving them for the consumers. And this is nothing new. All of our heirloom varieties, our heirloom tomatoes and lettuces and everything that we eat, those are actually still hybrid varieties, varieties that have been a result of human artificial selection and human breeding for many, many generations. In fact, many of our most important crops have been bred for hundreds if not thousands of years. So, in particular, why breed cranberries? One of the main reasons that we want to breed cranberries is to improve nutrition. Cranberries are already nutritious, but anything we can do to help the consumer is going to be good. One of the most important traits might be increasing cranberries disease and pest resistance. As we're continuing to progress in the 21st century, we're realizing more and more that our applications of pesticides and insecticides may not be the best way to deal with these problems in producing fruits or any types of crop. And if we can continue to breed for things like disease and pest resistance, we can limit the effects that growing cranberries can have not only on consumers but also limit the environmental footprint of the actual agricultural practices. We can also breed for better taste. I have the opinion that Americans are maybe losing the taste for cranberries. They were obviously important as a fresh fruit, and these days their importance has turned to more produced means of eating them that involve sweetening them up I guess is what I want to say. Higher and more consistent yields Cranberries are a perennial fruit. So you plant them one time, and the beds can continue to produce fruits for lots and lots of years. In fact, the average age of a bed here in Wisconsin is over 30 years old. So you plant the vines one time, and you need to keep getting a consistent yield to make the investment worth it for you, I guess. And earlier maturing cranberries, cranberry harvest is in the fall. And in the fall we can start having cold temperatures, snow, and ice, stuff that might damage our fruit. So we want to move the harvest up if we can a little bit in order to prevent those damages. And, finally, cold tolerance. Those vines underneath the ice all winter, and the buds that are going to produce the flowers that fruit the next year are already present. So any sort of tolerance that we can make sure that all of those buds make it through the winter we can increase our yields. And, finally, adaptation to specific environments and geographic regions. Cranberries aren't only grown in Wisconsin. They're grown throughout the US and Canada, and they're actually moving into new places like Chile and places in Europe. So those all have different environments and different conditions, and we can breed cranberries so that they produce best in each of those unique conditions and environments. Colonial propagation. A unique aspect of cranberries is they're not planted by seeds like many of our most important crops. And it's kind of neat the way that they're grown. Farmers are growers. They simply mow the old cranberry beds, bundle them up, and move them to another site. And they spread them on the ground and they start growing. And I liked this image that I have here, and it says that the labor of planting vines traditionally was performed by women. One woman would take a bundle of these vines that have been cut and drop them into little furrows they had dug in the sand. Another woman would take a hoe and cover them up. And those two women would do this all day and gain a nice wage of about 75 cents per day. And today this is still pretty similar to the way that we grow them except for we have new machinery that makes the task less labor intensive. So you can still see we're planting vines, we're planting clones, just mowing off old pieces of cranberry and planting the cranberries from those old pieces, and they turn into new cranberries which is really neat. But it really changes the way that we look at breeding cranberries. So, traditionally, the first cranberries, like I mentioned Henry Hall, were wild selections. So people were simply walking around, looking at wild cranberries, and picking the best ones, like I have here in this image, and bringing them home and planting them so that they had supposedly the best cranberries that they could have. And this was an important practice for a very long time. Until 1958 there were still 92% of all cranberries were grown with these big four, which were native selections. And, in fact, Early Black is a native selected cranberry, a wild cranberry, and is still the predominate cranberry grown on the east coast. And you can see that it was found in the wild in 1835. A lot of these native selections have cool names like Howes, McFarlin, Potter's Favorite, and they're often named after the growers who first found them, which is kind of neat, I think. Cranberry breeding beginnings. In 1929, the USDA began a cranberry breeding program, and they kind of realized that maybe the native selections that we had didn't quite meet all of the needs of the industry. And the major objective, first objective, was to develop varieties that were resistant to false blossom disease which was caused by a phytoplasma, and the blunt nosed leaf hopper here was the victor that transporter the disease between beds. And this was causing major problems in the early 1900s. So they initiated a program, and they used something called hybridization. And hybridization is kind of the general tool of plant breeding. Everybody uses hybridization no matter what crop they're using. And the basic idea is that you can take two plants, a yellow plant and an orange plant. You can see here, that's the color of fruit they're making, and they're kind of average sized. When we cross them to produce offspring, just like you might have brothers and sisters and you all are different heights and different sizes and different shapes, the same thing happens when we cross cranberries or any other plant. We can get some progeny or offspring that have yellow fruits, some that have orange fruits, some that are bigger, and some that are smaller. In fact, what's kind of interesting is that sometimes when we produce hybrids, they have new combinations of traits. So we can get red fruits, and we can get really big fruits. And cranberries are particularly interesting because when you make a cross and you have a really good fruit, you can pick that one, and since you can propagate it, you can keep planting that same good plant over and over again for years upon years. So that's really neat. And this is a picture of the Wisconsin research station that was established near Wisconsin Rapids in the early 1900s. If you look at the second row, the second beds, you can see little individual square plots, and that's how they would kind of evaluate each of those offspring. So each seedling they would eventually plant in these little squares and they would let it grow, and over the years they would evaluate how does it perform in this environment. Does it produce good fruit? Is it resistant to the disease? Whatever they were interested in, and eventually they can select the best ones, plant them in other locations around the state and on the east coast, and finally pick the best cranberry progeny. And those progeny become cultivars, and they're released to growers to plant on their farms throughout the nation. And you can see here that these newest cultivars, the first hybrids in cranberries that were made, were given names like Franklin, Beckwith, Stevens, Wilcox, and Bergman, and they're named after really important cranberry researchers of the late 1800s, early 1900s. What's particularly interesting is if you notice the first, the big four, the most important wild selections were the parents of most of these new hybrid cultivars, and that's because in plant breeding we want to take two good things and combine them both into one new thing. We want to make the best cranberry that we can, so we use the best germplasm that was available at the time. And finally, the last thing I want you to notice from this table is these dates over here, and these are the dates when those cranberries were finally released to growers. And this is a pretty significant deal. So if you think about it, it was started in 1929, so if we do the math, 1950 minus 1929 is 21 years. So we have this problem with this disease that's hurting the cranberry industry, and it takes us 21 years of breeding to come up with a solution. So that's a significant issue that we've been trying to improve over time. Here's an image of some of those first cranberry cultivars. On the left, in this box, are wild cranberries. On the top left, Vaccinium macrocarpon, that's the scientific name. This is just an example of any wild cranberry you might find on a hike in Wisconsin. McFarlin, Ben Lear, and Searles are members of the big four or other important wild selections So you can see they're kind of a little bit larger size than the average wild cranberry. On the right, we can see our first hybrid cranberries. And they might not look that different. They may be a little bit larger and a little bit more of a consistent red color. If you look at Bergman, it especially has more of a deep, dark red color, and that deep, dark red color is the presence of those anthocyanins. The red color of cranberries is anthocyanins accumulation, which was an important antioxidant we talked about earlier. A lapse in breeding history. After the initial USDA program, cranberry breeding kind of went on hold, and although it was on hold, cranberries maintained their position at the Thanksgiving table, They were still important. In fact, the cranberry industry continued to expand for multiple regions basically because of the new technologies that it adopted. An important part of this process was the formation of the Ocean Spray Cooperative, and not only did they improve the advertisement of cranberries, they also developed new products that could allow cranberries to be sold beside the traditional cranberry sauces, fresh cranberries, and juices. And one of the first most important products, in 1963 Ocean Spray released Cran-Apple, the industry's first juice blend. If you've been to the grocery spray lately, Ocean Spray has a lot more juice blends. There's Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Grape, Cran-everything that you can think of. But this was a very important part, and it really increased the sales of cranberries in the US. In 1993, Ocean Spray released the Craisins, which are kind of the cranberry version of a raisin. They're sweetened dried cranberries. Those were introduced in 1993, and they're gaining popularity not only in Wisconsin but across the world, around the globe. One thing that I think, as a breeder, and I think a lot of breeders were particularly interested in was the release of White Cranberry Juice in 2002. The reason this was particularly interesting is because it was made possible by the presence of a certain wild cultivar that was found. And it's known as Yellow Bell. So if you can see here, the cranberry fruit, this is mature cranberry fruit but they maintain the yellow color. They're unable to produce the anthocyanins that give it the red color. Therefore, we can use it to make white juice. So that's kind of interesting. That's something as a researcher in the USDA Cranberry Genetics Lab, we want to try to understand what's going on with the White Cranberry Juice. Like I mentioned earlier, cranberry products are a very important part of the industry. In fact, 95% of all cranberries that are grown are eventually turned into products, and only 5% are sold as fresh or frozen cranberries. And we have all sorts of products now. We have juices, juice blends, we even have powdered cranberries that are sold as important vitamin or nutrient supplements, dried cranberries, sliced cranberries, and sauces and jellies and who knows what will be next. Changes in cranberry production. These changes in the way that cranberries were harvested has really, really changed the industry. We've gone from having to do hand labor to mechanization and wet harvest that leads to these images that you can see here that are what we see now in our Ocean Spray commercials and what we think of when we think of cranberries. These beautiful beds floated with these nice red berries floating on top. And I want to take a moment to just really talk about cranberry growing and harvesting because I think it's a really interesting part of this fruit, and it's a very important reason to why cranberry commercialization began because of the anatomy of the fruit and the physiology So if you look here, this image, this is in the fall, and the cranberry bed has been flooded with water. The growers are ready to pick it so they flood it with water, and cranberries have these unique vacuoles, these little air pockets in them that allow the fruit to float to the top of the water. So they're floating to the top of the water, but unfortunately they're still stuck to the vine so the growers have to do something to unstick them from the vine. And they've come up with all sorts of neat inventions and ways of getting them off the vines. And you can see here, here's a guy driving a tractor through his bed. And some growers have things like harrows that just kind of tear through the vines and rip the berries off with them. Some of them have, it looks almost like soybeans heads that are turning and knocking the berries off. There's all sorts of neat ways of doing this, but the main goal is to simply knock the berries off so they float to the top of the water. Once they float to the top of the water, they can use these big booms that I think look kind of like fishnets. I don't know exactly what they do, but they float on top of the water, and they allow us to corral all of the berries over to one edge of the bed. And after we corral all the berries over to one edge of the bed, then we can eventually load them onto trucks, as you can see they're doing here in this image. And to load them onto the trucks they use even more cool machinery. So they have these big, giant vacuums, basically, and they suck the cranberries out of the water and with the water in them and they go up all sorts of cool things, doodads, and a lot of the semi trucks or trailers have these little holes in the bottom that cranberries stay in the truck but the water then runs back out and back into the bed. And I want to take a moment to talk about the importance of water for cranberries. So cranberry production and expansion could never have happened. Dry harvesting cranberries is not an easy process. So flooding the beds has really changed the way cranberry production is done. And I think this is an important part if you think of Wisconsin's state ecology and environment. A lot of these cranberries are grown in marsh areas, and one of the reasons why is because that's where they're native to. They need the acidic soil of the slowly decaying mosses and plants that have been there for thousands of years. And although they're really water intensive, it's kind of nice, in my opinion, because they need the water to be present at all time. So each acre of cranberry bed that you see, in the back, way back here, you can see these trees, and those are actually marshes. So they need multiple supporting acres for each acre of cranberry to hold the water during the summers and the rest of the seasons of the year. And by doing that, if you can imagine, by every acre of cranberry that we've produced, if we have four or five acres of supporting marshland ecology, we're preserving our environment, taking the water out and putting it back in while at the same time allowing for this important industry. Rather than simply draining all the marshes and planting corn or soybeans or whatever we want to plant. So I think that's a really neat part of the industry. And also, what I've noticed is if you look at the state fishing records and sizes, a lot of the biggest fish caught in Wisconsin besides in the Great Lakes are by cranberry growers in their lakes. I don't know if that's an untold secret. I might not have been supposed to say that, but that's something I've noticed. So after the growers harvest the berries, pull them out of the water, and put them in these trucks and trailers, they haul them to usually a place on their own growing site. They dump them into these huge holding tanks where they're rinsed with water, washed off, and then eventually loaded into little crates. So we don't use wooden crates anymore. They use mostly plastic crates that are eventually put on semis and hauled away to whatever processing facility they might use. And I wanted to put a picture in just so you can see how cranberries grow. So you can notice, this is sometime in the late summer, mid-fall. And you can see there's vines everywhere and just how densely and packed the cranberries are growing. Every inch, almost, is covered by a cranberry, and I think that's something unique. A lot of our wild crops, if you imagine, the fruits aren't, they don't yield really, really high, and I think that's something really interesting to think about cranberries is without very much effort at all the cranberries are also already doing great things. Imagine what the crop can become after a few more years of breeding and efforts. Cranberries have really only been grown for less than 200 years, and researching cranberries and breeding has been happening for less than 100 years. So there's a lot of potential. Cranberry expansion in Wisconsin. So as we began developing new cranberry products that can be sold to consumers and new agricultural technologies, cranberries expanding throughout Wisconsin. You can see here, we have multiple counties in Wisconsin where cranberries are grown, but most of the production is localized in central Wisconsin in the Jackson, Monroe County areas, Wood County areas. And recently, actually not even recently, in the last 20 years or so Wisconsin has become the largest producer of cranberries in the world. There's over 21,000 acres produced that are producing cranberries, and last year, despite the drought, it didn't really affect the cranberry industry that much, and they had one of the highest years ever. They produced over 4.9 million barrels, and barrels are kind of the industry standard. One barrel is equivalent to 100 pounds. So that's 490 million pounds of berries, which is worth over $350 million it brings into the state of Wisconsin. So it's pretty, it's the most important fruit crop in the state And this year, actually, I was just talking to one of the Wisconsin growers this week, and they're estimating that the yield for cranberries, this is the best year ever. They're estimating almost 5.5 million barrels of cranberries. And while that sounds like a good thing, a lot of the growers are worried because they might not gain the premium prices that they've been used to. Supposedly, depending on if you sell to Ocean Spray Cooperative or what independent producer you sell it to, they might get as low as $10 a barrel. And the price you need is about, the growers spend about $35 a barrel producing the cranberries. So they're actually losing money. The second generation of breeding. So, breeding has started again in cranberries, which I'm happy about. That's my business now days. And this is a really neat article that was published in the Wall Street Journal in 2004 talking about the first patented cranberries. So it was produced by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. I think that's kind of neat that it was published in the Wall Street Journal. That's all I want to say about that. And Wisconsin now days isn't the only cranberry breeders in the country. At the Philip E Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research, blueberries and cranberries are really, really close relatives. They're the same genus. Nicholi Vorsa started his program in 1985, and he's been breeding cranberries ever since. And I like this quote from the interview to Integrity Propagation Company in 2007. It says, "Now after 22 years, hundreds of crosses, and evaluation of more than 20,000 progeny," which are the offspring from all those crosses, "Dr. Vorsa is ready to release the new varieties to all cranberry growers." And you can see that we didn't really speed up the process at all. He started in 1985, and it still took 22 years before he made something available. And that still is kind of the trend today you'll see. The Valley Corporation is a group of private breeders from Wisconsin, and it's actually just the Grygleski family. It's Ed Grygleski Jr and Ed Grygleski Sr. and they have many generations of history in Wisconsin. Their family has been involved in cranberry growing, and Ed Grygleski Sr just got interested in breeding cranberries and started his own cranberry breeding business at his farm. And you can see here, this is the way he did it. We have all these little squares. Each of these little squares is a cranberry seedling. And he grows them for a while, this is how it's done by Vorsa, and actually the University of Wisconsin also, they grow them for a while and they pick the best little squares. And the next thing they do is they move them up to these larger squares, you can see in the bottom. And eventually they decide which of those larger squares is the best, and they replicate those squares. They share them with other farmers and other universities in multiple states. And eventually together they decide on cranberries that are good enough to become a cultivar status, and that merits sale to other growers. Finally, the Wisconsin breeding program. The Wisconsin breeding program was led by Eric Zeldin and Brent McCown. They came up with the first new hybrid cultivar since the USDA 1929 program. And their cultivar that was published in the Wall Street Journal is HyRed. And you can see here it was specifically selected and bred for a high anthocyanin content. This figure shows that HyRed versus Stevens, another cranberry cultivar that was one of the first hybrids released, over time accumulates much more anthocyanins. And you can see it's a lot, it's a big difference. If you look at the differences in the fruits, you can see there's a lot more red color. And that's something that I know these two breeders and the state of Wisconsin is very proud of is that we have a breeding program again, and we're helping Wisconsin growers gain premium prices of the color of their fruit. The more red the fruit color is, the higher prices that you can gain. So that's an important quality trait that was bred for. And here's a list of some of the newest cultivars that were released from 2003 to 2012 by those three groups of breeders. And you can see we have HyRed from the University of Wisconsin and also Sundance. The Philip Marucci Center was at Rutgers University in Jersey. And you can see they released some cultivars as well. The thing to notice, though, the last cultivars released in the 1950s and 1960s, and it took 50 plus years before we were able to supply cranberry growers with new varieties. And that's something that we're still considering how do we get around that because part of that is simply that's the way that cranberries are grown. When you breed a cranberry and you get a vine and you have to just cut that vine into a bunch of pieces to propagate it, you can't just all the sudden have all these vines that you can plant everywhere. So part of it is you'd have to scale up gradually from these small squares to larger and larger squares until there was enough vines ready to be sold to growers to plant new beds. But other problems with it are just the way that it's done. The selection processes, the traditional hybridization methods, although good and although better the second generation of breeding, we had a better idea of which parents had which traits and what we were going to get when we crossed them. But there still is improvement And here's another image of the most recent releases. So HyRed in the bottom right corner is the most recent released cranberry, and you can see how dark red it is. And then the other cranberries, Beckwith, Stevens, and Bergman, are the original hybrids, three of the original five hybrids I discussed earlier. So it's larger and darker in color. The next generation of cranberry breeding. So, Dr. Juan Zalapa is my advisor, and he was hired just in the last couple years to begin a USDA cranberry breeding and cranberry genetics lab on campus. And that's where I work today. And we're hoping to bring in scientific research in genetics and genomics to not only speed up the process but to speed up our understanding of cranberries. Cranberries have been traditionally forgotten in scientific research. There hasn't been as many funds and studies centered on cranberry research. So, how are we going to change this cranberry breeding strategy? Well, we want to use genetics and genomics. And I have put these two figures here. These are recent studies that our lab performed. And you can see that they look like circles with a lot of colored squares. And my reason for putting up this here is just that genetics and genomics research is complicated. That's what I wanted to say. But, in fact, if you look closer at the circles, eventually you'll realize that each of those little squares around the circles is a gene. And by understanding the organization of those genes and how those genes work together to produce important traits in cranberries and other crops, we can improve our ability to predict what's going to happen when we cross two parents. What's the result going to be? And, in fact, as we improve our ability to predict, we get to the point where we know instead of predicting anymore. And that's the power of genetics and genomics. And we still are using traditional hybridization methods, so we're still crossing two parents. One thing that's good to know is that there's currently no transgenic or genetic engineering going on in our cranberry breeding program, and there's not a transgenic or genetic engineered cranberry grown anywhere in the world that you can buy. So we're simply using age old practices and hoping to improve them through scientific research. So, what's our goal? Well, the goal of any genetic study is to understand something about how genes work in an organism. So if you want to imagine for a moment that we want to understand what the genes involved are in anthocyanin accumulation. What makes cranberries red? One important way that we usually go about doing this is we can cross a Yellow Bell variety, so something that doesn't produce any anthocyanins, and something that produces a lot of anthocyanins. And it's possible that the resulting offspring might look something like this where we have some of them that look just like Yellow Bell, something that ranges in between, and finally something that looks like HyRed that produces a lot of anthocyanins. And, unfortunately, this tells us nothing besides that if you cross them, there's different levels of anthocyanins. So this is when the research begins. Now we have to try to understand what's the genetics going on. And the way we traditionally answer those types of questions is using genetic mapping. Genetic mapping is our tool in genetic and genomic studies to identify and localize the genes involved in some certain trait that we're in interested in, like anthocyanin accumulation. And this is a difficult concept, but I'm going to try to explain it to you using a library metaphor. So if you want to imagine a library, there's lots of books in a library. A library is kind of like a genome. There's lots of genes in a genome. Each book in a library has its own call number so we can find it if we're looking for it pretty quickly. And the same way we can assign a call number to all the genes in a genome. I've kind of showed how that would work. So we have chromosomes, and chromosomes, we can imagine, are kind of like sections of a library. So a library has a mystery section. And a plant, cranberries in general have 12 chromosomes. So they have 12 sections that we can go to to look for these genes. Within those sections, those sections can be broken down into general locations. So we can break the mystery section down a little bit farther. And, finally, we have an exact location. We can pinpoint where that book or where that gene is located in a genome and inside a chromosome. To do that we use a genetic phenomenon known as recombination. And that's kind of movement between libraries. So the reality of the situation is not only do eukaryotes, plants and animals like us, have one library, we have two libraries. You have a genome from your mom and a genome from your dad that you inherit. And when a mom and a dad go to produce offspring, instead of giving only one, either your grandma's or your grandpa's chromosome or genome, you want to combine them so that you increase genetic diversity. So I want to talk about this. So if we can imagine this is one organism and one chromosome from one organism. That chromosome has a chromosome from its mom, which is white, and a chromosome from it's dad. And when this organism wants to make a new offspring, it doesn't just want to give it its mom's chromosome or its dad's. It wants to give a combination of each, and recombination is how that happens. These two chromosomes cross over and they break and they form two new chromosomes that are partially from the mom and partially from the dad which is neat, and that's how it works in all organisms. And it was actually discovered by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1916 already. So it's nothing real new. But we can use this to our advantage when we think about looking for our gene. So we're back to our library metaphor. So remember, we don't just have one library; we have two libraries. So let's imagine for a moment that we have books from the Middleton Public Library and books from the Madison Public Library. And you can see each of the books has their own call number, but also notice that we're looking only at one chromosome or one section. We're looking at the A section for both of the sets of books. And I'm likening each of the Middleton and Madison as a chromosome in my explanation. When recombination occurs, remember how we crossed the two parents chromosomes, we mix up the libraries something like this might happen. Now we have a new library, or a new chromosome, that has a few books from the Madison Library and eight books from the Middleton Library. And notice they're not just new books. These four are inherited from here, and these eight are inherited from above, from the Middleton Library as well. They're the exact same books, they're just shuffled and mixed up together. And this is important because this tells us, this is a way that we can understand how genes are inherited. So when we cross our anthocyanin intense HyRed with a Yellow Bell that doesn't have any anthocyanins, we can figure out how the library is shuffled and hopefully identify which parts were left behind when we have a medium, and which parts we retain. And the way we do that is using genetic markers Genetic markers are like these magic tools, and I'm convinced they're magic because they're incredible. But they allow us to ask this really important question of is this book from the Middleton or the Madison Library. In the same way, it's a way that we can ask is this gene or genome that we're looking at from the, which parent is it from. That's a really powerful tool. So, if you notice, the markers that I have here are these little circles. So if it's from Middleton Library, it's got a green circle. And you notice each of them has a different letter. So they have their own names. They always go to the same place in the genome every time. And the books from the Madison Library had the same names but they have orange circles so we can tell the difference. When we make a new offspring and we have this recombination event and the library is shuffled, you can see now how the books are blue and red. In real life we can't see the differences in the colors of books or the differences in how the chromosomes are inherited. We have to use these markers. So it turns out that now I can use these markers and ask the same question again. Where are these books from? And you'll notice that this book here is from the Madison Library still, and I know that because it's got an orange dot. And this book here, just two books over, is from the Middleton Library, and I know that because it has the green dot. And so I know that the recombination event happens somewhere in between those two markers. By repeating that experiment thousands of times on many, many plants, we eventually come up with our genetic map, which is our library with markers that have the call number associated with it. So you can see here I have 10 chromosomes, and now I've just put a square around a box that has the list of markers that I know those markers locations on the chromosome. So you can see here, for example, here is SCF3061, and that's the name of the marker, and its exact location is chromosome one, 17.1. And that's all the information I know. I don't know anything about what genes are there. In fact, if you remember how the general location and the exact location worked, when I'm at 17.1 and the next marker is 33.9, that means there's a ton of genes in between there. All I know is that there's that much distance between those two markers. So how do I use that call number genetic mapping information to identify the variation that I see here in the colors of the different offspring? And that's when you have to use some statistics. And that analysis is known as QTL analysis. And it searches for the, when we ask an offspring where did all of these markers come from, which library did each of these markers come from, we have a really unique set of information that tells us how much of each chromosome was inherited from each parent. And by correlating that information, eventually we can come up with something like this where we know that one chromosome, we asked the question where did this book come from? What library did it come from? And in fact it turns out that if a little section of that library, if you asked the question where did this book come from with these four markers, as I have circled here, oops, and they're all from the HyRed library, so the really anthocyanin dark library, then you know that you maintained the ability to produce anthocyanin. Whereas if any of those books were inherited from the Yellow Bell, the non-anthocyanin producing library, you can no longer produce anthocyanin. And so this is powerful information. It doesn't tell us anything about what genes are involved because we still have a big range. We have from 50.2 to 70.7 general and exact locations. So there's a lot of genes in there. But at least we've narrowed it down from the possible 20,000 genes of the whole genome, or even more, to a smaller subset. And in fact for breeding purposes, we never have to identify the gene involved at all. We can use this marker information in breeding. And this is the last concept I want to tell you about is called marker assisted selection. So this is applying genetics to breeding in our hybridization technique. So let's pretend for a moment that we have a red-fruited plant. And if you look really closely, you can see that there's these little flies flying around it and eating the leaves. On the right, we have this yellow-fruited plant. Notice there's no leaves being eaten by flies because it's resistant to fly eating for some reason. It's got some genetics going on. We do that genetic mapping study, and we find out that there is markers associated with the resistance to fly eating, and for our purposes those markers are pink. And you can see how these markers are associated. If the flies are eating you, you have the blue markers. You don't have any of the pink markers. So now we crossed those, and we don't want the yellow plants because the red fruits are prettier or they're better for some reason. So we have a new set of offspring, but sometimes not only do we not want the yellow fruits, they might have some other bad traits. So by crossing the red offspring again, we can focus the traits we're interested in to one plant. So we cross those red plants again, and now we have all these new offspring here. And the great part of this is that we don't have to run the experiment where we take the flies, put them on all the plants, and see which plants they eat. We can simply take one leaf from each of the plants, extract the DNA, ask the question for those specific markers what library are you from? Which parent are you from? And if it has the pink markers, we know that it has the disease resistance. It's not going to be eaten by flies even though we didn't run the experiment. If it has the blue markers, then we know we don't want that plant because even though it might look pretty and be red, it no longer has the disease resistance so it's not going to be able to resist being eaten by these leaf-eating flies. And that might seem like something simple to you, but the reality of it is that it's not only one trait that we can look at. We don't only have to look at one marker. Maybe instead of just leaf-eating flies, we have 20 other diseases that we want to breed for at the same time. Instead of making those little square test plots and evaluating each of those little square test plots for each of the diseases that we want to have resistance to, we can just ask the markers

for each of those traits

do you have the markers, do you have the right color that means you're going to be resistant to whatever disease I'm interested in, or do you have the right color that means you're going to produce the really red fruit that we want? Do you have the marker that's going to make sure that you have the most cold tolerance that's going to allow you to produce consistent yields year after year? And that's the real power of this genetics and genomics research. And it's why I'm excited to be in plant breeding. That's what I'm studying right now. I think it can make a real difference in the world. And you can notice that right now cranberry breeding is still consistently taking 20 years for each time, and, although this is a lot of research, each of these you have to generate populations just like before and evaluate them, and so the next cultivars probably still won't be released for another 20 years. However, this research, we end up building up these resources, this set of markers so that each round we have more information and are able to concentrate all of those important traits that we identify. We want to improve the crops into one cranberry that's our best shot at facing the environmental, social, and economic problems of the cranberry industry and providing the best cranberry we can for consumers. So, with that, thank you very much for coming. I have to thank many of the people in my lab and many of the people at the university that helped make this talk possible and performed a lot of the research involved. Thank you to the University of Wisconsin and the USDA for the funds and the areas they've provided to us, and also the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers. The growers have done a ton. The reason that our program exists is because the growers are there, and they allow us to use their own farms to test our newest varieties and perform the experiments we want at their place. So they're very, very involved in all the stuff that's being done. So, thank you very much.

APPLAUSE