![]() Tart cherries are allotetraploids, meaning instead of having two sets of chromosomes like humans, they have four sets from at least two different species. The complexities come from the tart cherry's parental plant chromosomes. Together they found that the Montmorency tart cherry genome was more intricate than they originally thought. Hollender and Goeckeritz teamed up with Amy Iezzoni, MSU professor emerita and the nation's only tart cherry breeder Kathleen Rhoades, Iezzoni's doctoral student Bob VanBuren, an assistant professor in the Department of Horticulture and MSU's Plant Resilience Institute Kevin Childs, director of the MSU Genomics Core and Patrick Edger, an associate professor in MSU's Department of Horticulture. ![]() "I was complaining about it to everyone and, finally, one of my friends suggested we just sequence the tart cherry genome." "I was trying to align the tart cherry DNA sequences with the peach genome and they just weren't aligning very well," said Goeckeritz. For Hollender's doctoral candidate, Charity Goeckeritz, an exercise in frustration piqued her curiosity. ![]() Sequencing it provides a map for researchers when they are trying to-for example-grow a cherry tree that will bloom later in the season. Genomes contain all the genes and genetic instructions for an organism's development. "I naively thought that this would be an easy endeavor we would simply sequence a few early and late-blooming cherry trees and align the sequences to the peach genome and get an answer in just a few weeks," said Courtney Hollender, an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at MSU. The research was published in the journal Horticulture Research. ![]()
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