Construction of an intra-specific sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) genetic linkage map and synteny analysis with the Prunus reference map

Linkage maps of the sweet cherry cultivar ‘Emperor Francis’ (EF) and the wild forest cherry ‘New York 54’ (NY) were constructed using primarily simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and gene-derived markers with known positions on the Prunus reference map. The success rate for identifying SSR markers that could be placed on either the EF or NY maps was only 26% due to two factors: a reduced transferability of other Prunus-species-derived markers and a low level of polymorphism in the mapping parents. To increase marker density, we developed four cleaved amplified polymorphic sequence markers (CAPS), 19 derived CAPS markers, and four insertion–deletion markers for cherry based on 101 Prunus expressed sequence tags. In addition, four gene-derived markers representing orthologs of a tomato vacuolar invertase and fruit size gene and two sour cherry sorbitol transporters were developed. To complete the linkage analysis, 61 amplified fragment length polymorphism and seven sequence-related amplified polymorphism markers were also used for map construction. This analysis resulted in the expected eight linkage groups for both parents. The EF and NY maps were 711.1 cM and 565.8 cM, respectively, with the average distance between markers of 4.94 cM and 6.22 cM. A total of 82 shared markers between the EF and NY maps and the Prunus reference map showed that the majority of the marker orders were the same with the Prunus reference map suggesting that the cherry genome is colinear with that of the other diploid Prunus species.