An international research consortium has sequenced the genome of the woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca, hoping to find ways to breed tastier, hardier varieties of the berry and other crops in its family.

Led by Kevin Folta, University of Florida, USA, the consortium identified genes critical to horticultural traits including flavor, nutritional value and flowering time. Protein-coding genes were identified by using a newly developed pattern recognition program called GeneMark.hmm-ES+. This gene prediction modeling method used both DNA and RNA sequences to identified 34,809 genes, of which 55 % were assigned to gene families.

The woodland strawberry is a member of the Rosaceae family, but was shown to lack the large genome duplications seen in other rosids.

• The genome of woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca)
  V. Shulaev, D. J. Sargent, R. N. Crowhurst, T. C. Mockler, O. Folkerts et al.,
  Nature Genetics 2010.
  DOI: 10.1038/ng.740