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Article|12 Mar 2014|OPEN
Transcriptional dynamics of the developing sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) fruit: sequencing, annotation and expression profiling of exocarp-associated genes
Uwe Jonas1 , Myriam Declercq1 , Steven Van Nocker2 , Moritz Knoche1 and Merianne Alkio,1 ,
1Institute of Horticultural Production Systems, Leibniz Universität Hannover, D-30419 Hannover, Germany
2Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1325, USA
*Corresponding author. E-mail: merianne.alkio@obst.uni-hannover.de

Horticulture Research 1,
Article number: 11 (2014)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/hortres.2014.11
Views: 912

Received: 20 Nov 2013
Accepted: 17 Jan 2014
Published online: 12 Mar 2014

Abstract

The exocarp, or skin, of fleshy fruit is a specialized tissue that protects the fruit, attracts seed dispersing fruit eaters, and has large economical relevance for fruit quality. Development of the exocarp involves regulated activities of many genes. This research analyzed global gene expression in the exocarp of developing sweet cherry (Prunus avium L., ‘Regina’), a fruit crop species with little public genomic resources. A catalog of transcript models (contigs) representing expressed genes was constructed from de novo assembled short complementary DNA (cDNA) sequences generated from developing fruit between flowering and maturity at 14 time points. Expression levels in each sample were estimated for 34 695 contigs from numbers of reads mapping to each contig. Contigs were annotated functionally based on BLAST, gene ontology and InterProScan analyses. Coregulated genes were detected using partitional clustering of expression patterns. The results are discussed with emphasis on genes putatively involved in cuticle deposition, cell wall metabolism and sugar transport. The high temporal resolution of the expression patterns presented here reveals finely tuned developmental specialization of individual members of gene families. Moreover, the de novo assembled sweet cherry fruit transcriptome with 7760 full-length protein coding sequences and over 20 000 other, annotated cDNA sequences together with their developmental expression patterns is expected to accelerate molecular research on this important tree fruit crop.