Citrus breeding in South Africa: the latest developments in the programme run by the ARCInstitute fo

The South African Agricultural Research Council's Citrus Plant Improvement Programme run by the Institutefor Tropical and Subtropical Crops consists of a number of separate projects. These involve conventional scionbreeding to improve productivity and quality, rootstock breeding for soil adaption, disease resistance andimproved yields, mutation breeding, and evaluation of both scions and rootstocks in different climatic zones. These projects are also supported through the Citrus Improvement Programme, a vast germplasm collection,various biotechnology techniques such as embryo rescue and ploidy manipulation, and the use of molecularmarkers to distinguish between, at this stage citrus mandarin selections. This paper will give a short overviewof the research activities within each of the projects, as well as the most important results achieved by each.