A Draft Genome of the King of Fruit, Mango (Mangifera indica L.)

Mango (Mangifera indica L.) is called “king of fruits" in India due to its sweetness, richness of taste, huge variability, large production volume and variety of end usage.  It is a member of the family Anacardiaceae and is an allotetraploid (2n= 40) fruit tree with small genome size of about 450 Mbp. India is the largest producer of mango in the world, with an annual production of 15.03 million tons from an area of 2.31 million hectares (FAOSTAT, 2011), contributing about 56% of the total world production. More than 1,000 varieties of mango exist in India today that contribute 39.5% of the total fruit production in the country. Apart from fresh fruit mango is used in various forms such as pickle, chutney, jelly while mango shake is a popular drink throughout the world. Despite its huge economic importance the genomic resources in mango are very limited and genetics of useful horticultural traits are poorly understood. Here we have generated more than 70 Gbp (~160X) shotgun and pair-end next generation sequence data on mango genome using Roche 454 and Illumina (MiSeq and HiSeq) sequencing technologies. As first draft assembly a total of 412,728 (~432 Mbp) contigs were generated covering more than 95 % of the genome. Total 63,130 genes were predicted with an average gene length of 711 bps. We also mined 196,362 SSR in the assembled draft. Generation of additional SOLiD, PacBio sequencing data is in progress which will be further used for improving the mango genome assembly. The information on mango genome will provide valuable resource for mango variety improvement.