Breeding Accel was founded in 2014, when KP Holland, Schoneveld Breeding, Sion Orchids and Interplant Roses joined forces in order to minimalize the “Time to Market” for new products. This collaboration in research and innovation has proven fruitful by enabling all parties involved to effectively use the collective knowledge and research facilities, which has in turn allowed for the efficient development of new molecular and cell biological techniques.
Recently, Fresh Forward Breeding has joined this partnership. Fresh Forward belongs to the top of Northern-European fruit breeding, and mostly specializes in the breeding of strawberry and apple. Fresh Forward intensively cooperates with Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and constitutes a valuable addition to the Breeding Accel partnership, due to its research capacity, extensive knowledge of molecular breeding, and its close ties with WUR.
By joining Breeding Accel, Fresh Forward gains access to the knowledge and facilities of the Breeding Accel partners concerning the cell biological elements of breeding.
Molecular vs cell biological
According to Peter van de Pol, spokesperson of Breeding Accel, Fresh Forward brings a new perspective on research and breeding, due to its specialization in different crop groups, and therefore brings valuable new insights to the Breeding Accel partners. "In the ornamental industry, breeding is still done traditionally. Crossing and selection is being done on the physical characteristics. In the fruit and vegetable industry, one is more experienced in breeding on molecular level. The breeding process of an apple, for example, takes so to speak a lifetime and on top of that, traditionally, they pay more attention to all kind of sustainability characteristics like heat tolerance and resistance against, for example, botrytis. Also ethylene resistance, for example. It is a problem that is being encountered in several ornamental crops, but in the fruit industry, they have already more techniques and experience with it."
Therefore, the cooperation between these companies that seem to be quite different makes a lot of sense. "At Schoneveld, at our lab, we have developed several accelerated protocols that have proven to be efficient for several of our partners in Breeding Accel and they could also implement them. KP Holland further developed phenotyping, selecting on the basis of pictures and smart software. And this resulted in interesting insights for other parties, in a non-competitive way."
"For Fresh Forward Breeding is the cooperation with the WUR particularly interesting. At the University, they are conducting a lot of research into what new techniques, like CRISPR-Cas, have to offer. GM is not allowed yet in Europe, but when things change and for as far as possible, we would like to anticipate on the future options."
For more information
Breeding Accel
Peter van de Pol, spokesperson and Director-owner Schoneveld Breeding
Email: petervandepol@schoneveld.nl
Fresh Forward Breeding
Teunis Sikma, General director
Email: info@fresh-forward.nl