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Cucumis melo (melon or muskmelon) is an important crop in the family of the Cucurbitaceae. Melon is cross pollinated and domesticated at several locations throughout the breeding history, resulting in highly diverse genetic structure in the germplasm. Yet, the relations among the groups and cultivars are still incomplete. We shed light on the melonbreeding history, analyzing structural variations ranging from 50 bp up to 100 kb, identified from whole genome sequences of 100 selected melon accessions and wild relatives. Phylogenetic trees based on SV types completely resolve cultivars and wild accessions into two monophyletic groups and clustering of cultivars largely correlates with their geographic origin. Taking into account morphology, we found six mis-categorized cultivars. Unique inversions are more often shared between cultivars, carrying advantageous genes and do not directly originate from wild species. Approximately 60% of the inversion breaks carry a long poly A/T motif, and following observations in other plant species, suggest that inversions in melon likely resulted from meiotic recombination events. We show that resistance genes in the linkage V region are expanded in the cultivar genomes compared to wild relatives. Furthermore, particular agronomic traits such as fruit ripening, fragrance, and stress response are specifically selected for in the melon subspecies. These results represent distinctive footprints of selective breeding that shaped today’s melon. The sequences and genomic relations between land races, wild relatives, and cultivars will serve the community to identify genetic diversity, optimize experimental designs, and enhance crop development

Cucumis melo (melon or muskmelon) is an important crop in the family of the Cucurbitaceae. Melon is cross pollinated and domesticated at several locations throughout the breeding history, resulting in highly diverse genetic structure in the germplasm. Yet, the relations among the groups and cultivars are still incomplete. We shed light on the melon breeding history, analysing structural variations (SV) ranging from 50 bp up to 100kb, identified from whole genome sequences of 100 selected melon accessions and wild relatives. Phylogenetic trees based on SV types completely resolve cultivars and wild accessions into two monophyletic groups and clustering of cultivars largely correlates with their geographic origin. Taking into account morphology, we found 6 mis-categorized cultivars. Unique inversions are more often shared between cultivars, carrying advantageous genes and do not directly originate from wild species. Approximately 60% of the inversion breaks carry a long poly A/T motif, and following observations in other plant species, suggest that inversions in melon likely resulted from meiotic recombination events. We show that the resistance genes in the linkage V region are expanded in the cultivar genomes compared to wild relatives. Furthermore, particular agronomic traits such as fruit ripening, fragrance and stress response are specifically selected for in the melon subspecies. These results represent distinctive footprints of selective breeding that shaped today’s melon. The sequences and genomic relations between land races, wild relatives and cultivars will serve the community to identify genetic diversity, optimize experimental designs, and enhance crop development.

We determined the crossover (CO) distribution, frequency and genomic sequences involved in interspecies meiotic recombination by using parent assigned variants of 52 F6 recombinant inbred lines obtained from a cross between tomato, Solanum lycopersicum and its wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium. The interspecific CO frequency was 80% lower than reported for intraspecific tomato crosses. We detected regions showing a relative high and low CO frequency, so called hot and cold regions. Cold regions coincide to a large extent with the heterochromatin, although we found a limited number of smaller cold regions in the euchromatin. The CO frequency was higher at the distal ends of chromosomes than in pericentromeric regions and higher in short arm euchromatin. Hot regions of CO were detected in euchromatin, and COs were more often located in non-coding regions near the 5’UTR of genes than expected by chance. Besides overrepresented CCN repeats, we detected poly-A/T and AT rich motifs enriched in 1 kb promoter regions flanking the CO sites. The most abundant sequence motifs at CO sites share weak similarity to transcription factor binding sites such as for the C2H2 zinc finger factors class and MADS box factors, while InterPro scans detected enrichment for genes possibly involved DNA break repair.

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Breeding by introgressive hybridization is a pivotal strategy to broaden the genetic basis of crops. Usually, the desired traits are monitored in consecutive crossing generations by marker-assisted selection, but their analyses fail in chromosome regions where crossover recombinants are rare or not viable. Here, we present the Introgression Browser (IBROWSER), a bioinformatics tool aimed at visualizing introgressions at nucleotide or SNP accuracy. The software selects homozygous SNPs from Variant Call Format (VCF) information and filters out heterozygous SNPs, Multi-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (MNPs) and insertion-deletions (InDels). For data analysis IBROWSER makes use of sliding windows, but if needed it can generate any desired fragmentation pattern through General Feature Format (GFF) information. In an example of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) accessions we visualize SNP patterns and elucidate both position and boundaries of the introgressions. We also show that our tool is capable of identifying alien DNA in a panel of the closely related S. pimpinellifolium by examining phylogenetic relationships of the introgressed segments in tomato. In a third example, we demonstrate the power of the IBROWSER in a panel of 597 Arabidopsis accessions, detecting the boundaries of a SNP-free region around a polymorphic 1.17 Mbp inverted segment on the short arm of chromosome 4. The architecture and functionality of IBROWSER makes the software appropriate for a broad set of analyses including SNP mining, genome structure analysis, and pedigree analysis. Its functionality, together with the capability to process large data sets and efficient visualization of sequence variation, makes IBROWSER a valuable breeding tool.

Background Identification of biological specimens is a requirement for a range of applications. Reference-free methods analyse unprocessed sequencing data without relying on prior knowledge, but generally do not scale to arbitrarily large genomes and arbitrarily large phylogenetic distances.ResultsWe present Cnidaria, a practical tool for clustering genomic and transcriptomic data with no limitation on genome size or phylogenetic distances. We successfully simultaneously clustered 169 genomic and transcriptomic datasets from 4 kingdoms, achieving 100 % identification accuracy at supra-species level and 78 % accuracy at the species level.ConclusionCNIDARIA allows for fast, resource-efficient comparison and identification of both raw and assembled genome and transcriptome data. This can help answer both fundamental (e.g. in phylogeny, ecological diversity analysis) and practical questions (e.g. sequencing quality control, primer design).