Short and sweet: the strawberry genome

Happy holidays to everyone, and here's a very short seasonal post: the strawberry genome is here! Kevin Folta from the University of Florida led the effort to put the paper together for the journal Nature Genetics, and he has a nice behind-the-scenes summary on his blog here. One tasty tidbit is that the initial proposal for funding failed because the peach and apple genomes had stronger support - but strawberry beat them both (neither of those genomes is yet complete). It's the first plant to be assembled entirely from next-generation sequences, thanks in large part to the efforts of assembly guru Art Delcher.

And the genome really is "short and sweet", weighing in at just 240 million bases of DNA. (See the paper here.) That's pretty small, for a plant. The apple tree genome is over ten times larger, and the pine tree is 100 times larger. But strawberries are sweeter.