Vegetables rank 4th among the largest commodity crops in Georgia and accounts for 9.1% total of all commodity groups in 2021 and vegetable production is constantly increasing in Georgia. Among all vegetables, bell pepper and onion are in the list of top four vegetables grown across the state’s 159 counties. Nationally, Georgia ranks 3rd after Florida and California in bell pepper contributing to total of 10.5% of national production while it produces almost 11.7% of total vegetable production of Georgia with around 6,600 acres (UGA Ag Snapshot, 2024).
Overall, a comprehensive and holistic approach is aimed to be implemented in the envision vegetable breeding program to achieve the streamlined objectives of developing sweet pepper (with an emphasis on bell pepper) cultivars that are stress-tolerant and have enhanced fruit quality. Considering the outlined objectives of breeding for biotic stresses (disease and insect), fruit quality, and horticultural traits, we would like to include an integrated omics and speed breeding approaches to develop the vegetable breeding program that emphasizes on sweet pepper followed by other important vegetables including onion, tomato, snapbean, and other relevant vegetables.
Our breeding approach would include conventional breeding, marker assisted selection, integrated omics (genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics), and genome editing.
