Cherry breeding work at Fruit Research Institute, Čačak - past, present and future

Cherry breeding work at Fruit Research Institute, ^a~ak has had a long tradition since its initiation in1960, using planned hybridization within Prunus avium L. and Prunus cerasus L. as the main method. Two sweet cherry (‘Asenova Rana’ and ‘^arna’) and two sour cherry cultivars (‘[umadinka’ and ‘^a~anski Rubin’) have been released in the previous period, and three new sour cherry cultivars (‘Sofija’, ‘Nevena’ and ‘Iskra’) have been named and released in 2015. Current sour cherry breeding started in 2011, and is based on the use of domestic genotypes, well adapted to the environmental conditions of the area, and introduced genotypes ‡ knownsources of resistance, with a high cropping potential and good fruit quality. Special attention has been paid to sour cherry germplasm from the West Serbia region, whose variability is an abundant source of diversity ‡ for clonal selection and using the autochthonous genotypes in commercial growing, or as parents in planned hybridization. Nowadays, one sweet cherry (‘V/60’) and two sour cherry (‘GV-6’ and ‘GV-10’) genotypes are under procedure of recognition at Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management of the Republic of Serbia. Theinvestigations are also focused on different aspects of cherry floral biology ‡ flowering phenology, pollen quality, monitoring the pollen tubes growth in the pistil, and cytoembryology. Reproductive behaviour as pollen donors/recipients were considered from the context of genotypic specificities, and their expressions in relation toflowering temperature, especially warmer. Decades-long research work on self- and cross-(in)compatibility incherries was started by monitoring fruit set percentage under field conditions, and later developed by observingpollen tubes growth in the pistil using fluorescence microscopy, to find solutions for the adequate choice of cultivars combinations that provide the best performance in terms of fruit set and yields. In addition, S-genotypingof autochthonous, domestic and foreign sweet cherry cultivars has also been begun by using consensus and specific primers for identification of S-RNase alleles