A.C. Rootstock

Budget: €132,247

Summary: The CIF-Lourizán has selected 22 candidates for rootstocks, obtained through genetic improvement, resistant to ink disease and better adapted to the climate than the current commercially marketed rootstocks, which have problems establishing in central and inland areas of Galicia. While these materials are completing the process of being registered in the Commercial Varieties Register, it is essential to ensure that they are fully compatible with grafting, that their vegetative propagation is highly viable, and to ensure, as far as possible, that they are tolerant to cancer and other possible chestnut afflictions. With the goal of ensuring a secure transfer of these products to the sector, this Cooperation Action (AC) proposes a comparative evaluation of different vegetative propagation techniques, as well as determining early compatibility through green grafting and the systematic incorporation of a novel histological technique for predicting late incompatibility. A health monitoring of this material will also be conducted, evaluating the degree of tolerance to certain pathogens, and, finally, with the cooperation of IXP-Castaña de Galicia, a pilot plot will be installed incorporating the final selection of candidates, grafted with varieties of highest commercial interest, which will allow the in situ confirmation of the good performance of this material in a productive chestnut area.

Thus, the optimization in this AC consists of reducing the transfer times of the new hybrid patterns, while increasing the guarantee of the material quality and its usefulness to provide direct solutions to the sector. Innovations include the establishment of an early prediction technique for graft compatibility in chestnut and the final development of new genetically improved products. In other words, once the new materials are approved, nurseries will already know the behavior of these hybrids and will be able to choose those that best adapt to their production system, and producers will have a greater guarantee of climatic adaptability, health, and graft compatibility, which will significantly reduce the current losses due to these reasons, sometimes leading to the sudden death of well-formed trees.