Strawberry is a fruit crop species of major horticultural importance, for which fruit quality and the control of flowering (for fruit yield), runnering (for vegetative propagation), and the trade-off between the two are main breeding targets. The octoploid cultivated strawberry has a limited genetic basis. This raises the question of how to identify important gene targets and successfully exploit them for strawberry improvement. In this Opinion article we propose to apply to woodland strawberry, a wild diploid species displaying wide diversity, the strategies successfully employed in recent years for the identification of genetic variations underlying fruit quality and fruit yield traits in solanaceous crops (tomato, potato). Next we propose to use gene editing technologies to translate the findings to cultivated strawberry.

草莓是具有重要园艺意义的水果作物，其果实品质和开花控制（水果产量），转轮（无性繁殖）以及两者之间的权衡是主要的育种目标。八倍体栽培草莓的遗传基础有限。这就提出了一个问题，即如何确定重要的基因靶点并成功地利用它们进行草莓改良。在这篇观点文章中，我们建议将森林草莓（一种表现出广泛多样性的野生二倍体物种）应用于近年成功用于识别茄科作物（番茄，马铃薯）的果实品质和果实产量性状的遗传变异的策略。接下来，我们建议使用基因编辑技术将研究结果转化为栽培草莓。