New Research Taps Into Genetics To Catch Strawberry Runners

Strawberry growers pour roughly $130 million a year, nationally, into a surprisingly stubborn problem: strawberry runners. These fast-growing offshoots stretch out from the mother plant, siphoning energy that would otherwise go into plump, market-ready berries. University of Florida-led research has been on the case in finding ways to track down strawberry runners.

UF/IFAS doctoral student Kaitlyn Vondracek is now digging deep into the genetics behind strawberry runner formation, hoping to dial down the plant’s impulse to sprawl.

“Growers have found that removing runners from plants in the field improves both the quality and yield of the fruits,” Vondracek says. “As such, it’s become a standard process for growers to trim runners from fruit-producing plants.”

But without automation, that’s an expensive process as it must be done by hand.

Seonghee Lee, UF/IFAS Associate Professor of horticultural sciences and Vondracek’s advisor, says her project ultimately could help farmers reduce labor costs by breeding strawberries that make very few runners.

“This would allow growers to significantly reduce the need for manual runner removal, which is becoming increasingly difficult due to labor shortages and rising wages. Across the U.S. and globally, low-runner strawberry varieties have strong potential to improve sustainability, especially in regions facing similar labor constraints.”

With the research, which should be complete this year, scientists seek strawberries that make few runners during fruit season in Florida, but many runners in nurseries in places like Oregon or Canada, Vondracek adds.

“To do this, we find the parts of DNA that control runner growth,” she says. “With traditional breeding, combined with DNA technology, we use simple DNA tests to pick the best breeding parents and seedlings with the variants that we know are associated with our desired trait — in this case, fewer runners. ”

For more information about this new research project, visit blogs.ifas.ufl.edu.