Abstract
Blueberry is a kind of new rising popular perennial fruit with high healthful quality. It is of utmost importance to develop new blueberry varieties for different climatic zones to satisfy the demand of people in the world. Molecular marker assisted breeding is believed to be an ideal method for the development of new blueberry varieties for its shorter breeding cycle than the conventional breeding. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) markers are widely used molecular tools for marker assisted breeding, which could be detected at large scale by the transcriptome sequencing. Here, we sequenced the leaves transcriptome of 19 rabbiteye (Vaccinium ashei Reade), 13 southern highbush (Vaccinium. corymbosum L × native southern Vaccinium Spp) and 22 cultivars of northern highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum L) by using next generation sequencing technologies. A total of 80.825 Gb clean data with an average of about 12.525 million reads per cultivar were obtained. We assembled 58,968, 55,973 and 53,887 unigenes by using the clean data from rabbiteye, southern highbush and northern highbush blueberry cultivars, respectively. Among these unigenes, 3599, 3495 and 3513 unigenes were detected as candidate resistance genes in three blueberry crops. Moreover, we identified more than 8756, 9020, and 9198 SSR markers from these unigenes, and 7665, 4861, 13,063 SNPs from the annotated single copy unigenes, respectively. The results will be helpful for the molecular genetics and association analysis of blueberry and the basic molecular information of pest and disease resistance of blueberry, and would also offer huge number of molecular tools for the marker assisted breeding to produce blueberry cultivars with different adaptive characteristics.
Highlights
Blueberry is perennial flowering shrub or small tree, which comprises of about twenty members that belong to section) Cyanococcus, genus Vaccinium, and family Ericaceae [1]
A reference genome of blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum with diploid genome) has been published, and researchers can access it by the genome Browser8.5.2 software
Among the three kinds of unigenes annotated by Nr database, the top 15 species hit by about 60% annotated unigenes were Vitis vinifera, Theobroma cacao, Sesamum indicum, Nelumbo nucifera, Jatropha curcas, Prunus mume, Nicotiana tomentosiformis, Gossypium arboreum, Nicotiana sylvestris, Populus euphratica, Brassica napus, Citrus sinensis, Medicago truncatula, Solanum tuberosum, and Gossypium raimondii (S3 Table)
Summary
Blueberry is perennial flowering shrub or small tree, which comprises of about twenty members that belong to section) Cyanococcus, genus Vaccinium, and family Ericaceae [1]. The blueberry is a delicious fruit, and its fruits are famous in the world for its high anthocyanins contents, and it is listed among the top five healthful fruits (non-citrus) in North America [2,3]. Blueberry cultivars planted in the whole world are still mainly from North America [15], and the new blueberry producing countries have different climatic and soil conditions compared to the native blueberry producing area [16]. In order to cope with the challenges from various ecological and climatic conditions, more new widely adaptive cultivars are required for the development and growth of blueberry industry. Blueberry is a perennial fruit crop with long juvenile period and complex ploidy genome [17,18,19]. Modern molecular marker assisted breeding techniques and genetic engineering techniques are apt to overcome these problems and accelerate the breeding process [19]
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