Comparison of Theobroma cacao cultivars: Low coverage WGS approach

This sequence data was generated as part of a project that explored the utility of whole-chloroplast sequences to distinguish intra-specific variation in cultivated cacao (Theobroma cacao). Our data demonstrates that the whole chloroplast sequence of cultivated cacao lineages harbor sufficient information to reliably distinguish varieties and even individual genotypes. We conclude that this approach, which could be understood as a extension of the traditional ''DNA-barcoding'' concept through next-generation sequencing, shows great promise for applications where very closely related or interbreeding taxa must be distinguished.