RESUMO
PREMISE OF THE STUDY: Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) is one of the oldest cultivated trees and is critical to the development of arid land. The date palm is a dioecious monocot with separate male and female trees. This presents a challenge in development as it is impossible to distinguish trees until they flower approximately five to eight years after planting. METHODS AND RESULTS: We have developed PCR-based assays capable of sex differentiation in multiple date palm cultivars. The primers are designed across gender-specific polymorphisms and demonstrated greater than 90% accuracy in distinguishing date palm gender across multiple varieties. CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that the primers should be helpful in rapidly distinguishing date palm gender from the earliest stages that DNA can safely be collected. This is a vast savings in time over present approaches.
Assuntos
Arecaceae/genética , Primers do DNA/genética , Polimorfismo Genético , Arecaceae/classificação , DNA de Plantas/genética , Reação em Cadeia da Polimerase , Polimorfismo de Fragmento de Restrição , Especificidade da Espécie , Fatores de Tempo , ÁrvoresRESUMO
Date palm is one of the most economically important woody crops cultivated in the Middle East and North Africa and is a good candidate for improving agricultural yields in arid environments. Nonetheless, long generation times (5-8 years) and dioecy (separate male and female trees) have complicated its cultivation and genetic analysis. To address these issues, we assembled a draft genome for a Khalas variety female date palm, the first publicly available resource of its type for a member of the order Arecales. The â¼380 Mb sequence, spanning mainly gene-rich regions, includes >25,000 gene models and is predicted to cover â¼90% of genes and â¼60% of the genome. Sequencing of eight other cultivars, including females of the Deglet Noor and Medjool varieties and their backcrossed males, identified >3.5 million polymorphic sites, including >10,000 genic copy number variations. A small subset of these polymorphisms can distinguish multiple varieties. We identified a region of the genome linked to gender and found evidence that date palm employs an XY system of gender inheritance.