Prunus Genome sequencing

Prunus is an economically important genus with a wide range of physiological and biological variability. Using the peach genome as a reference, sequencing reads from four almond accessions and one sweet cherry cultivar were used for comparative analysis of these three Prunus species. Reference mapping enabled the identification of many biological relevant polymorphisms within the individuals. Examining the depth of the polymorphisms and the overall scaffold coverage, we identified many potentially interesting regions including hundreds of small scaffolds with no coverage from any individual. Nonsense mutations account for about 70,000 of the 13 million identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Blast2GO analyses on these nonsense SNPs revealed several interesting results. First, nonsense SNPs were not evenly distributed across all gene ontology terms. Specifically, in comparison to peach, sweet cherry is found to have nonsense SNPs in two 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase (ACS) genes and two 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate oxidase (ACO) genes. These polymorphisms may be at the root of the non-climacteric ripening of sweet cherry. A set of candidate genes associated with bitterness in almond were identified by comparing sweet and bitter almond sequences.