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Fire blight, caused by Erwinia amylovora, is a destructive bacterial disease that severely hampers apple production. To conduct QTL (Quantitative Trait Locus) studies for breeding resistant apple cultivars, phenotyping of large genetic mapping populations of apples for fire blight resistance is essential. This, however, necessitates precise, quantitative data spanning multiple years, locations, and pathogen strains. It can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to keep QTL mapping populations for apples in the field and greenhouse. This creates a bottleneck for identifying novel QTL for fire blight resistance or developing resistant cultivars. To address this challenge, we present an image-based method for rapid and accurate phenotyping fire blight resistance using apple leaf discs. This leaf disc assay demonstrates significant (p |
