The joint work of breeders with specialists of an interdisciplinary team is the key to success in breeding

To develop new apple cultivars that have all the basic requirements of production, it is extremely necessary to create interdisciplinary teams that, in addition to breeders, would include specialists in other specialties: physiologists, biochemists, cytoembryologists, phytopathologists and geneticists. These groups include the author of the cultivar, its co-authors, as well as specialists of various profiles who are not authors and co-authors of cultivars, but take an active part in their creation. In this article, we tried to show the importance of such interdisciplinary teams in creating cultivars in RRIFCB for 65 years of work on apple breeding. It was found out that in the creation and zoning of 56 apple cultivars when creating one cultivar, there was only one author (Pamyat Voinu) and two authors when creating Orlik and Orlovskoe Polosatoye. The other 53 cultivars were created by three or more co-authors. Unfortunately, often in the literature only the first author of the cultivar is named, and the rest of the co-authors are silent. We consider it necessary to note that more than 40 years of purposeful work on the creation of new apple cultivars in RRIFCB was devoted by a leading researcher, Candidate of Agricultural Sciences Serova Z.M. She is a co-author of 43 apple cultivars included in the State Register; the co-author of 22 cultivars was Doctor of Agricultural Sciences Zhdanov V.V.; the co-author of 16 cultivars were Doctors of Agricultural Sciences Krasova N.G. and Dolmatov E.A.; Doctor of Agricultural Sciences Sedysheva G.A. was the co-author of 14 cultivars; Candidate of Agricultural Sciences Korneeva S.A. and also Mikheeva M.V. were the co-authors of 5 cultivars; Candidate of Agricultural Sciences Khabarov Yu.I. was the co-author 4 cultivars and N.S. Trofimova T.A. was the co-author of 3 cultivars. A very important role in the creation of new apple cultivars, in addition to the authors and co-authors, is played by other members of the interdisciplinary team - the so-called participants. The article presents 12 participants in the creation of new apple cultivars bred by the Russian Research Institute of Fruit Crop Breeding.