ASHS 2024 Conference

The renowned horticultural artist and plant breeder Luther Burbank worked with many different species of plants. During his 50-year career, he introduced over 800 cultivars, including more than 150 accessions of plums (Prunus spp.) in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Burbank preferred utilizing wide, interspecific crosses to create a vast range of phenotypic variation and then artificially select from the extremes. While a very great artist, Burbank was a substandard scientist because he was derelict in pedigree note-taking. Though many of his introductions are extinct, hobbyists, enthusiasts, and international collections retain nearly a third of the economically viable cultivars he bred. For a century, many of his hybridizations remained inscrutable mysteries until modern genomic and computational tools developed their resolution and statistical power. Today, genotyping by sequencing (GBS) is a useful tool for pedigree reconstruction in the absence of reliable records. GBS can inform principal component analyses (PCA), identity by descent (IBD) kinship, and phylogenetic admixture, revealing complex relationships among taxa. In this study, whole genome sequencing was performed on 53 Prunus taxa used by Luther Burbank in his breeding experiments in the most comprehensive genetic survey of his work to date. Exact parent-offspring relationships between this population may be impossible to discern due to years of back crossing, sibling mating, and open pollination. However, the proportion of genomic similarity amongst these taxa provides information on the relatedness of the genotypes in Burbank’s Prunus experiments, defining four primary lineages within his breeding population. These lineages are comprised primarily of P. salicina and P. simonii, but also have influences from P. americana, P. cerasifera, P. domestica, and P. rivularis. The prevalence of P. simonii in Burbank’s Prunus introductions appears to have been vastly underreported, indicating that some of the seedstock founders of his breeding population could have been P. salicina x P. simonii hybrids at the inception of his career. This research has implications for pedigree reconstruction and prioritizing conservation in collections curation for future studies.