Unraveling the avocado genome to speed up avocado breeding programs. Paper of Alicia Talavera, Aboozar Soorni, Aureliano Bombarely, Antonio Matas and Iñaki Hormaza in Scientific Reports
Modern crop breeding is based on the use of genetically diverse plant material. This work is focused on avocado, a crop in which, in spite of its recent commercial success, based in a single variety, ‘Hass’, there is a need to develop molecular tools to advance in the development of new varieties better adapted to the new challenges faced by this crop. In order to achieve that goal, we have sequenced the genome of ‘Hass’ avocado to use it as a reference to study molecular markers generated in 71 avocado accessions representing the three botanical races (Mexican, Guatemalan and West Indian). The molecular markers generated have been used to study the genetic diversity and population structure of these accessions, allowing to predict the botanical race of unknown accessions and making available more than 7000 high quality molecular markers for the avocado scientific community.
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