Functional and Evolutive Analysis of the Avocado Genome

Avocado (Persea americana) is one of the rare crop plants among the basal angiosperms that belong to Lauracea family. Genomic characterization of avocado will provide an opportunity to examine the developmental genetics of fleshy fruits and some of the mechanisms of early evolutive adaptations in flowering plants. Avocado is also a product of great social and economical importance for Mexico. A number of desirable traits such as disease resistance, fruit ripening, tree size and water use efficiency, among others, should be integrated into commercial cultivar in order to increase productivity in the future. However, due to the long life cycle and the difficulty of producing directed crosses, traditional breeding strategies are slow and costly. To use modern breeding strategies such as association mapping or transgenic strategies, it is important to have detail knowledge of the structure, sequence and expression of the avocado genome. With this aim, we have produced an EST database of different organs and fruit developmental stages and carried out the sequencing of the avocado genome. To generate a de novo avocado genome sequence we combined data from 454 and illumine sequencing platforms that make up to a 30X coverage of the genome. In this paper we will present an structural and functional analysis of the avocado genome