Data from: Genome-wide association mapping of date palm fruit traits

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 crop 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 GWAS mapping 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 crop species, demonstrating the importance of parallel evolution
in the evolutionary diversification of domesticated species.