2025/09/17 by Ting Yu, Ke Lin, Dongzi Zhu +7 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Phytoplasmas and Hemiptera pathogens #Berry genetics and cultivation research #Cocoa and Sweet Potato Agronomy
paper · doi:10.1016/j.jia.2025.07.022
openalex publication_date 2025/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Sweet cherry ( Prunus avium ) is an important stone fruit in the world's temperate zone. Molecular breeding has advanced considerably since the release of the first sweet cherry genome. However, genome assemblies for sweet cherry contained unresolved gaps and consisted of consensus chimeric sequences that did not distinguish haplotype alleles, greatly limited the study of inheritance of some important agronomic traits. In this study, we present a phased-resolved telomere-to-telomere reference genome of sweet cherry Tieton. A total of 653.03 Mb of sequence was anchored onto 16 pseudochromosomes representing the two haplotypes and 67,012 coding genes were identified, with 33,777 in hapA and 33,235 in hapB. It boasts a consensus accuracy surpassing a quality value of 44, a contig N50 exceeding 17.94 Mb, Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs completeness of 98.7%, and an long terminal repeat assembly index of over 20. This genome offers phased and annotated chromosome pairs, allowing a complete picture of sweet cherry's diploid genome organization. Using this reference genome, we characterized a large fragment deletion associated with yellow-skinned fruit in sweet cherry 13–33. This resource promises to be invaluable for breeding efforts and advancing genetic research in sweet cherries.