Wenzhong Huang , Zhongmei Hong

CRO Service Station, Sanya Tihitar SciTech Breeding Service Inc., Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2025, Vol. 16, No. 6   
Received: 05 Nov., 2025    Accepted: 11 Dec., 2025    Published: 22 Dec., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study mainly introduces how the pathogen of Alternaria leaf spot disease infects apples, explains how the pathogen and apples interact with each other, summarizes some current research progress in apple disease resistance, and also sorts out the methods of developing molecular markers based on resequencing, the identification steps of resistant materials, and the basic strategies of disease-resistant breeding, etc. The research results show that Alt resistance sites, NBS-LRR disease-resistant genes, ROS-related pathways, hormone regulatory modules and some genes related to structural defense are all involved in the disease resistance process of apples together. Combining resequencing with expression data can help identify candidate genes with high credibility more quickly and accurately. This study aims to provide an operational technical framework for future apple disease-resistant breeding and also offer some theoretical references.

Apple Alternaria leaf spot; Genome resequencing; Candidate gene mining; Genetic basis of resistance; Molecular markers and gene editing