454 Pyrosequencing Based Transcriptome Analysis for Fruit Skin of Mango, Mangifera indica

In Japan, mango cultivation is gradually spreading, with customers preferring the cultivar ‘Irwin’, which has a red skin color, sweet flavor and low-fiber pulp content. However, ‘Irwin’ is prone to several agronomic problems, physiological disorders and diseases, anthracnose and stem-end rot, under the climatic conditions of Japan. To address these problems, our organization started breeding of mango in 2009 (Shudo et al., 2012). In the course of breeding, candidates of new commercial cultivars having a uniform red skin color have been requested from farmers and customers. Therefore, to obtain candidate genes involved in skin color, 454 pyrosequencing based transcriptome analyses for skins of two mango cultivars, ‘Irwin’ and ‘Keitt’, were carried out. For transcriptome analyses, fruits with a faint and intricate color from two cultivars were used. From sequencing of cDNAs originated from red and green color skins of ‘Irwin’, 690,078 reads and its resultant 16,569 contigs were obtained. In the analysis for green and pink colors of ‘Keitt’, 583,719 reads and its resultant 22,915 contigs were obtained. Then, to annotate the contigs, BLAST search was done against TAIR cDNA database using the contigs as queries. We present here genes expressed in the skins and their comparative analysis between 4 skin colors of 2 cultivars. The skin colors specific genes obtained from the comparative analysis are also present.