Peach structural genomics

Peach (Prunus persica) belongs to the Prunus genus and is a member of the Rosaceae family. It has been selected as a model species for genomics studies in virtue of several features (Abbott et al., 2002): it has a short juvenile phase (2–3 years) if compared to many other tree species; it has a small genome, just about twice the size of Arabidopsis (5.9 x 108 bp; Baird et al., 1994); it is diploid with a base chromosome number of x = 8; it is the best characterized Prunus species, where a number of traits of agronomic interest are under the control of monogenic loci (recently reviewed in Dirlewanger et al., 2004) The recent development of genomics and functional genomics tools demonstrated throughout this volume is making possible to effectively implement comparative genomics strategies in Rosaceae, using peach as the “basic” genome (Abbott et al., 2002).