PhD Candidate
Sajida’s work focuses on identifying nondarkening genes in cranberry beans. Post-harvest seed coat darkening is a detrimental trait that affects the appearance and cooking time of several market classes of beans, including cranberry beans. The dark background colour that develops in the bean during storage occurs in beans with a dominant allele for the Joker (J) gene (Basset 1996) that results in the accumulation proanthocyanidins (PA) in the seed coat (Beninger et al. 2005).
Erfatpour and Pauls (2020) showed that the recessive allele in Witrood, a nondarkening genotype, was associated with a single nucleotide deletion in the Phvul010G130600 gene, which encodes a R2R3-MYB transcription factor that controls the expression of genes that encode enzymes in the phenylpropanoid pathway and developed a dominant marker for the dominant J allele. The current study describes the use of a biallelic KASP marker and background markers to select for heterozygous individuals with elevated levels of the recurrent parent genotype in a backcross crossing scheme to introgress the nondarkening trait into elite cranberry genotypes.