Abstract
Understanding the genetic diversity in a crop population is key to its targeted breeding for desired traits, such as higher yields, better fruit quality and resistance to disease and changing climates. Date fruits represent a major crop in the Middle East and are key to achieving future food independence in arid countries like Qatar. We previously determined the genome of the date palm Phoenix dactylifera and showed that date palm trees world-wide divide into two distinct subpopulations of Eastern and Western origins. Here we applied a resource of SNPs from 179 commercially available date fruits to assess the genetic diversity of date palm trees grown in the State of Qatar. We found that palm trees in Qatar are mainly of Eastern origin, and that their genetic diversity doesn’t associate with regions of the State. Together with targeted genetic assays, our resource can be used in the future for date palm cultivar identification, to aid selecting suitable cultivars for targeted breeding, to improve a country’s date palm genetic diversity, and to certify the origin of date fruits and trees.
Highlights
Genetic diversity of plants is crucial to ensure sufficient food production to an ever-growing world population
Date palm trees are the most abundant permanent crops grown in the country, due to their ability to withstand the harsh climatic conditions that are prevalent on the Arabian Peninsula [34]
We showed that approximately 36% of alleles are private to either one of the two sub-populations, highlighting the high genetic diversity within the sub-populations [22]
Summary
Genetic diversity of plants is crucial to ensure sufficient food production to an ever-growing world population. Morphological features like leaf length and plant height were extensively used for cultivar selection. Such morphological features have limitations, as they require plants to be fully grown before these features can be assessed and used for classification [4]. The advent of molecular biology-based technologies, especially genomesequencing, has enabled rapid identification of plant cultivars based on genetic variation. These technologies include the use of random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers [5], simple sequence repeats (SSR) [6], amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP) [7], and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) [8,9,10]
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