Construction of black (Rubus occidentalis) and red (R. idaeus) raspberry linkage maps and their comparison to the genomes of strawberry, apple, and peach

The genus Rubus belongs to the Rosaceae and is comprised of 600-800 species distributed world-wide. To date, genetic maps of the genus consist largely of non-transferable markers such as amplified fragment length polymorphisms. An F(1) population developed from a cross between an advanced breeding selection of Rubus occidentalis (96395S1) and R. idaeus 'Latham' was used to construct a new genetic map consisting of DNA sequence-based markers. The genetic linkage maps presented here are constructed of 131 markers on at least one of the two parental maps. The majority of the markers are orthologous, including 14 Rosaceae conserved orthologous set markers, and 60 new gene-based markers developed for raspberry. Thirty-four published raspberry simple sequence repeat markers were used to align the new maps to published raspberry maps. The 96395S1 genetic map consists of six linkage groups (LG) and covers 309 cM with an average of 10 cM between markers; the 'Latham' genetic map consists of seven LG and covers 561 cM with an average of 5 cM between markers. We used BLAST analysis to align the orthologous sequences used to design primer pairs for Rubus genetic mapping with the genome sequences of Fragaria vesca 'Hawaii 4', Malus × domestica 'Golden Delicious', and Prunus 'Lovell'. The alignment of the orthologous markers designed here suggests that the genomes of Rubus and Fragaria have a high degree of synteny and that synteny decreases with phylogenetic distance. Our results give unprecedented insights into the genome evolution of raspberry from the putative ancestral genome of the single ancestor common to Rosaceae.