Scientists have constructed and annotated the first reference genome for the sour cherry cultivar Montmorency, a 400-year-old French amarelle selection of unknown origin but the most widely-grown cultivar in the United States.
Sour cherry (Prunus cerasus), also known as tart cherry, is an important temperate tree crop whose fruit is valued for its uniquely sweet and acidic flavor and superior processing characteristics for products such as jam, juice, compote, and pie.
The species is a member of the economically important Rosaceae family, which includes other cultivated species in the genus Prunus such as peach, sweet cherry, apricot, almond, and plum, as well as apples, pears, roses, strawberries, and various cane fruits.
The evolutionary history of Prunus has been historically difficult to resolve as hybridization, polyploidy, and incomplete lineage sorting is rampant throughout the genus.
“I naively thought that this would be an easy endeavor; we would simply sequence a few early and late-blooming cherry trees and align the sequences to the peach genome and get an answer in just a few weeks. I couldn’t have been more wrong,” said senior author Dr. Courtney Hollender, a researcher at Michigan State University.
Genomes contain all the genes and genetic instructions for an organism’s development. Sequencing it provides a map for researchers when they are trying to, for example, grow a cherry tree that will bloom later in the season.
“I was trying to align the sour cherry DNA sequences with the peach genome and they just weren’t aligning very well,” said first author Charity Goeckeritz, also from Michigan State University.
“I was complaining about it to everyone and, finally, one of my friends suggested we just sequence the sour cherry genome.”
The authors found that the Montmorency sour cherry genome was more intricate than they originally thought.
The complexities come from the sour cherry’s parental plant chromosomes.
Sour cherries are…
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