iTHEMS Mini-workshop/ Theoretical Biology Mini-workshop

“Kazusa DNA Research Institute: Who is this?”
Dr. Satoshi Tabata (Kazusa DNA Res Inst, Director)

“Did the journey to strawberry start from Japan?”
Dr. Sachiko Isobe (Kazusa DNA Res Inst, Lab Head)

Strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is cultivated and consumed across the world. It is an allo-polyploidy species (2n = 8X = 56) with an estimated genome size of 1C = 708–720 Mb. Strawberry was artificially generated in the 16th century Europe, by crossing between two octoploid species, F. chiloensis and F. virginiana. The evolutionary origin and genome structure have been discussed and not fully determined. The first proposed structure was AABBBBCC model (Federova, 1946), then, Senanayake and Bringhurst (1967) proposed AAA’A’BBBB model. The fully allopolyploidy structure (AAA’A’BBB’B’) was suggested by Bringhurst in 1990 based on isozyme segregation. This model was also supported by the segregation patterns of CAPS markers (Kunihisa et al. 2011) and SSR markers (Isobe et al. 2013). However, just recently, Tennessen et al. (2014) proposed the AvAvBiBiB1B1B2B2, model, according to the results of targeted DNA capture and sequencing by using next generation sequencing (NGS) technology. In this model, Av represents the most F. vesca like genome, while Bi represents the most F, iinmae like genome. The origin of F. vesca is considered as North America, and F. iinumae is an endemic species in Japan. Our resent results of denovo whole genome sequencing support the AvAvBiBiB1B1B2B2 model, that suggest considerable part of the strawberry genome showed the highest similarity with F. iinumae.