(Molecular) Breeding of Lilium

Lily breeding has become an important economic activity in the last 50 years. Within this period breeding has changed from making end-products that were mainly interspecific hybrids from the section Sinomartagon to polyploid hybrids that are derived from intersectional crosses. Especially the Longiflorum × Asiatic hybrids or LA hybrids and the Oriental × Trumpets or OT hybrids have become dominant combinations in breeding because of their superior performance over Asiatic and Oriental hybrids. Molecular breeding utilises the information of markers linked to genes of interest to develop more efficient selection strategies in what is called Marker Assisted Selection. Molecular breeding is of particular importance when desired traits are difficult to phenotype (e.g., due to environmental variation influencing the trait), when simultaneous combinations of several genes are needed (e.g., quantitative resistance genes or yield) or in a combination of the two situations. The use of markers for breed¬ing has become an integrated part of the breeding schemes in many of the world’s important food crops. Especially the development of massive parallel sequencing methods known under the collective term Next Generation Sequencing (NGS sequencing) and the availability of high throughput marker systems have revolution¬ized the possibilities for molecular breeding. In most ornamental crops, and also in lily that is a model crop for research in interspecific hybridisation and cytogenetic, molecular breeding has not been imple-mented in actual breeding yet. Nevertheless there are some promising developments in research that are presented in this paper