Mango Genetics

Utility of mango transcriptome in a breeding program 

Amir Sherman¹, Mor Rubinstein¹, Ravit Eshed¹, Miri Benita², Mazal Ish-Shalom², Michal Sharabi¹, Ada Rozen¹, David Saada², Lee Sudai^2,3, Ron Ophir¹ and Yuval Cohen²

¹Genomic Unit,  ²Department of Fruit Tree Sciences, Instiute of Plant Science, Agricultural research Organization, Volcani Research Center, P.O. Box 6, Rishon Lezion , 50250, Israel

The Robert H Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 7610001, Israel.

Mango is one of the most important fruit crops in tropical and subtropical regions. We assembled the transcriptomes of two mango cultivars, Keitt and Tommy-Atkins and use them as a basis for our genetic and genomic analyses. Genetic variation was used to analyze the structure of our germplasm collection and to explore parentage relations of our accessions from our breeding programs. As mango crosses using hand pollinations are complicated and very inefficient, we established a post pollination assays for identification of paternal parents generated through open pollination based on unique SNPs signatures. Using this tool and high throughput genotyping platform we develop 7 different F1 populations that share the same accession as their maternal parent. These will form a unique resource for mango breeding. Based on the mango transcriptome we isolated a set of genes involved in pathways controlling fruit peel color. Combining expression, phenotyping and genotyping, we investigating  the molecular basis for mango peel color. These approaches will facilitate the identification of markers assisted breeding for mango peel color.