Synteny conservation between two distantly-related Rosaceae genomes: Prunus (the stone fruits) and Fragaria (the strawberry)

Santiago Vilanova¹^,3 , Daniel J Sargent² , Pere Arús¹ and Amparo Monfort¹

¹IRTA. Centre de Recerca en Agrigenòmica CSIC-IRTA-UAB, 08348 Cabrils, Spain

²East Malling Research (EMR), East Malling, Kent, ME19 6BJ, UK

³Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Centro de Conservación y Mejora de la Agrodiversidad Valenciana (COMAV), Spain

author email corresponding author email

BMC Plant Biology 2008, 8:67doi:10.1186/1471-2229-8-67


Published:	18 June 2008

Abstract

Background

The Rosaceae encompass a large number of economically-important diploid and polyploid fruit and ornamental species in many different genera. The basic chromosome numbers of these genera are x = 7, 8 and 9 and all have compact and relatively similar genome sizes. Comparative mapping between distantly-related genera has been performed to a limited extent in the Rosaceae including a comparison between Malus (subfamily Maloideae) and Prunus (subfamily Prunoideae); however no data has been published to date comparing Malus or Prunus to a member of the subfamily Rosoideae. In this paper we compare the genome of Fragaria, a member of the Rosoideae, to Prunus, a member of the Prunoideae.

Results

The diploid genomes of Prunus (2n = 2x = 16) and Fragaria (2n = 2x = 14) were compared through the mapping of 71 anchor markers – 40 restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs), 29 indels or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) derived from expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and two simple-sequence repeats (SSRs) – on the reference maps of both genera. These markers provided good coverage of the Prunus (78%) and Fragaria (78%) genomes, with maximum gaps and average densities of 22 cM and 7.3 cM/marker in Prunus and 32 cM and 8.0 cM/marker in Fragaria.

Conclusion

Our results indicate a clear pattern of synteny, with most markers of each chromosome of one of these species mapping to one or two chromosomes of the other. A large number of rearrangements (36), most of which produced by inversions (27) and the rest (9) by translocations or fission/fusion events could also be inferred. We have provided the first framework for the comparison of the position of genes or DNA sequences of these two economically valuable and yet distantly-related genera of the Rosaceae.