Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 5, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5026
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Funding
- Chief Scientist, Ministry of Agriculture
- Israel Bio-Tov Consortium & Magnet Program, Israel Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour
- Binational Agriculture Research and Development (BARD) [IS-3877-06, IS-4223-09C]
- Israel Science Foundation [386/06]
- EU
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Taste has been the subject of human selection in the evolution of agricultural crops, and acidity is one of the three major components of fleshy fruit taste, together with sugars and volatile flavour compounds. We identify a family of plant-specific genes with a major effect on fruit acidity by map-based cloning of C. melo PH gene (CmPH) from melon, Cucumis melo taking advantage of the novel natural genetic variation for both high and low fruit acidity in this species. Functional silencing of orthologous PH genes in two distantly related plant families, cucumber and tomato, produced low-acid, bland tasting fruit, showing that PH genes control fruit acidity across plant families. A four amino-acid duplication in CmPH distinguishes between primitive acidic varieties and modern dessert melons. This fortuitous mutation served as a preadaptive antecedent to the development of sweet melon cultigens in Central Asia over 1,000 years ago.
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