The objectives of this project are to develop new mandarin, orange, lemon and grapefruit-type cultivars suitable for California conditions. For mandarin cultivars, important traits are seedlessness, easy peeling, good flavor, high rind color, economic yield, and low tendency to alternate bearing. For grapefruit-type cultivars, the primary objective is to develop deeply red pigmented cultivars with sweet taste and low bitterness suitable for production in desert or inland valley regions. For lemon, the primary objective is a Lisbon type with very few seeds. The major approaches being used are hybridization-selection for mandarins and grapefruit, and mutation induction to obtain seedless forms of existing mandarins, oranges, and lemons. Promising selections are evaluated in field trials for tree size, yield, fruit quality, and disease susceptibility. Cultivars developed in the project are released to nurseries, generally under licenses from UC and thereby made available to growers.
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Provide the industry with preliminary data about characteristics of a large number of newly introduced selections and cultivars. Evaluate trueness-to-type of these cultivars distributed by the CCPP.
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