University of Cukurova
The Çukurova University (UCUK) is one of the major universities of Turkey due to its modern substructure and modern facilities meeting every requirement of its students and staff. UCUK was established in 1973 has 17 faculties, 5 Colleges, 12 Vocational Schools, 1 State Conservatory, 3 Institutes and 25 Research and Application Centres. The Agricultural Faculty has nearly 300 academic staff including 103 professors, 16 associate professors, 41 assistant professor and 150 research assistants. The faculty has ten departments (Agricultural Machinery, Animal Science, Farm Structures and Irrigation, Field Crops, Food Engineering, Horticulture, Landscape Architecture, Plant Protection, Agricultural Economics and Soil Science). The goals of the horticulture department are to generate information and skills through research directed to the horticultural problems of the region and the country. It is provided with modern equipment and infrastructure as well as lab facilities especially on plant biotechnology, plant physiology and post-harvest issues.
Main task in the project
UCUK will participate by providing some Turkish local strawberry genotypes and creating an F1 population to find a QTLs related to aroma and characterise these GenRes for the development of new resilient and high quality pre-breeding material and cultivars for improving sustainability in berry cultivation systems. UCUK will cooperate with YL doing all field trials, observations, and phenotyping of berries including strawberry, raspberry, blueberry. UCUK will also participate in the deficit water stress resistance test carried out in strawberry and blueberry GenRes in order to reveal the tolerance level of GenRes to different levels of water availability and adaptation to reduced water resources. UCUK will also be active in development and evaluation of a low-density SNP array for marker assisted selection and cultivar identification section of the project. UCUK will also take part in the evaluation of the GenRes materials for consumer sensory tests. UCUK will participate in the analysis of chemical components conferring nutritional and aroma/taste quality (Metabolomics). UCUK will participate in assessing postharvest performance of blueberries, raspberries and strawberries. UCUK will also join the international consortium assessment for validation through inter laboratory ring-testing. UCUK will also participate in the interpretation and iteration task.