New varieties are the major drivers of productivity in the Australian sugarcane industry. However, the development of new varieties takes approximately 12 years, and many important traits such as disease resistance are only assessed relatively late in the breeding cycle. The use of molecular markers linked to key traits in the variety development program will give breeders the ability to apply selection at earlier stages of the breeding cycle, allowing selection of promising clones and elimination of undesirable clones.

This project will develop a genetic analysis pipeline to characterise high value bi-parental populations, to deliver markers linked to commercially relevant traits for marker assisted selection (MAS).

The establishment of a molecular selection platform in SRA’s breeding program provides a genuine path to market for the outcomes from the CSIRO genetic analysis pipeline.