Michaela Jung honoured for contribution to fruit culture
Michaela Jung, a postdoc in a joint project of the Fruit Breeding Group at Agroscope and the Molecular Plant Breeding Group at ETH Zurich, has been awarded the Professor Albert Soenen Prize for her doctoral thesis. She developed genomic approaches that make apple breeding more efficient. The award ceremony will take place on 12 June 2024 in Belgium.
Genomic selection for apple traits
In her doctoral thesis, Michaela Jung showed that genomic selection methods can bring great advantages in apple breeding. She identified novel associations of 30 traits with genetic markers and showed precise genomic predictions for these traits in different European environments. This means that apple plants can be selected at an early stage without having to develop the corresponding traits (e.g. fruit quality or yield), which allows breeding to be accelerated.
Collaboration betweet Agroscope and ETH Zurich
Michaela Jung was supervised in her doctoral thesis by Andrea Patocchi, Group Leader Fruit Breeding at Agroscope, and Bruno Studer, Professor of Molecular Plant Breeding at ETH Zurich. Both are also the contact persons for her postdoctoral work, in which she is advancing genomic selection in Agroscope's apple breeding programme.
For pioneering work in fruit culture: The Professor Albert Soenen Prize
The Professor Albert Soenen Prize is awarded every 2 to 4 years by the foundation of the same name. Albert Soenen developed the research station of Gorsem in Belgium (today's Proefcentrum Fruitteelt - pcfruit) into a nationally and internationally renowned research institute for fruit culture.