Healthy Discoveries: Gene codes cracked for strawberries and chocolate

Teams of scientists have cracked the genetic codes of the wild strawberry and a certain type of cacao used to make fine chocolate, work that should help breeders develop better varieties

Healthy discoveries

of more mainstream crops.

The researchers said that the wild strawberry is closely related to important food crops like apples, pears, peaches and raspberries, as well as cultivated strawberries, so its gene map will help breeders of these plants to produce new varieties.

"Because farmers have been cross-breeding and hybridising food crops for centuries to improve qualities, they tend to have large complicated genomes but the wild strawberry's is relatively small so we can get access to all of these useful genes comparatively readily," said Dan Sargent of Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Crop Science Initiative, who worked on the project.

Sargent and an international team of researchers found in a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, that the wild strawberry genome has about 35,000 genes, about one and a half times the number that humans have, and most of these will also be in cultivated varieties, they said.

"This will quicken research that will lead to improved crops, specifically commercial strawberries," said Todd Mockler, of Oregon State University, one of the lead researchers on the team in the United States. 

"It could lead to fruit that withstands pests, smells better, requires less fertilizer, tolerates heat, has a longer shelf life, tastes better or has an improved appearance."

French researchers said In a separate study in the same journal,  that they had sequenced almost all of the genome for the Criollo variety of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao -- a tropical tree crop used to make chocolate. 

The work, which the scientists said they found nearly 29,000 genes and covered 76% of the estimated full genome, should help the genetic improvement of cacao crops. The cocoa tree was first cultivated about 3,000 years ago and almost 3.7 million tons of cocoa is presently produced each year.

The group working on the strawberry genes, which involved more than 70 researchers in five continents, sequenced the wild plant's genome by dispersing it into millions of short segments which were sequenced separately and then reassembled. 

Plants tend to have far more complex DNA than animals, and the scientists identified 34,809 genes in the wild strawberry. Humans have nearly 20,000 to 25,000 genes.

Scientists said in August that they had decoded and published nearly all of the highly complex genome of 

wheat, a staple food for more than a third of the world's people. 

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