Genome-wide association mapping of date palm fruit traits.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31615981.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-12604-9 and PMC identifier 6794320.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Date palms (Phoenix dactylifera) are an important fruit crop of arid regions of the Middle East and North Africa. Despite its importance, few genomic resources exist for date palms, hampering evolutionary genomic studies of this perennial species. Here we report an improved long-read genome assembly for P. dactylifera that is 772.3 Mb in length, with contig N50 of 897.2 Kb, and use this to perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of the sex determining region and 21 fruit traits. We find a fruit color GWAS at the R2R3-MYB transcription factor VIRESCENS gene and identify functional alleles that include a retrotransposon insertion and start codon mutation. We also find a GWAS peak for sugar composition spanning deletion polymorphisms in multiple linked invertase genes. MYB transcription factors and invertase are implicated in fruit color and sugar composition in other crops, demonstrating the importance of parallel evolution in the evolutionary diversification of domesticated species.
Medical subject headings
- Fruit
- Phoeniceae
- Pigmentation
- Sex Determination Processes