In INTRODUCTIONThe overall objective of the DARE project was to improve the knowledge on the genomic organisation of resistance factors in apple, and to select cultivars with a broad spectrum of resistance. Hence, an important topic of the project was the study of the variability and the geographical distribution of the pathogenicity of V. inaequalis in Europe, with a strong focus on partial resistances.However, the Vf gene was given special attention because it is the main source of scab resistance used in apple breeding programmes. Since the first detection of strains of V. inaequalis virulent to this gene in Germany and England (Parisi et al., 1993;Roberts and Crute, 1994), several reports on the presence of these strains in Europe were published. Race 7 was detected in

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