Influence of self-pollination in fruit quality of autogamous almonds

Due to the several advantages expected from growing self-compatible almond cultivars, breeding programmes have recently introduced self-compatibility as an important trait. However, doubts have arisen regarding the capability of the newly obtained self-compatible almonds to produce good yields in monovarietal plantations, and the commercial quality of the fruits from self-pollination. For this reason, in the last years several studies have been conducted to evaluate fruit set and fruit traits following self- and cross-pollination of self-compatible almonds. Their results showed inconsistencies for fruit set and for some of the fruit traits studied. Thus, while some studies showed no differences between both pollination types for any of the fruit traits, others clearly showed important differences with the detriment of self-pollination for commercially important fruit traits. The fact that some of these studies evaluated a low number of individuals and/or fruit traits, implies the need of a more complete study. In this work, 10 fruit traits were studied in 26 self-compatible almonds following self-pollination by bagging and open pollination treatments. In general, and despite a few individuals showed differences between both pollination types for two of the traits, the results showed no influence of self-pollination in fruit quality.