Papaya,
Carica papaya L., is a fast-growing fruit crop grown in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. Papaya fruit is among the most nutritious available. It is rich in vitamins A and C, and has been recommended for prevention of vitamin A deficiency in tropical and subtropical developing countries [
1]. In addition to fresh fruit production, papaya is grown for papain, a proteolytic enzyme widely used in food processing, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and leather industries, as well as medical applications [
2,
3].
The majority of flowering plants, unlike most animal species that produce unisexual individuals, produce 'perfect' flowers that contain both male and female organs. It has been reported that only 6% of 250,000 angiosperm species are dioecious, i.e. having male and female individuals [
4]. Papaya is one of the rare species classified as trioecious because its individuals exist as one of three sex types – female, male, or hermaphrodite. Sex determination in papaya is controlled by a pair of recently evolved sex chromosomes with the genotype XX for female, XY for male, and XY
h for hermaphrodite [
5,
6]. The difference between X and Y (or Y
h) chromosomes is a small non-recombination region, which is called the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY). The Y and Y
h originated from an ancestral Y chromosome about 73,000 years ago and share 98.6% DNA sequence identity in the MSY [
7]. The physical size of the MSY is about 8 Mbp and accounts for only about 13% of the papaya Y chromosome [
8,
9]. Papaya is an excellent system in which to study the early events of sex chromosome evolution.
Papaya originated in Central America where it was domesticated by aboriginals in this region [
10]. Hermaphrodite papaya trees are self-pollinated and hermaphrodite cultivars are in production in most papaya growing regions for the obvious reason that every hermaphrodite tree produces fruit. Nevertheless, dioecious cultivars are used in India, Australia, and South Africa to assure greater fruit production under cool winter temperatures. The first transgenic papaya cultivar SunUp is derived from hermaphrodite Solo cultivar Sunset that has undergone more than 25 generations of self pollination [
10]. The genomic DNA of hermaphrodite 'SunUp', that contains the X and Y
h chromosomes, was used for construction of a papaya bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library [
11], whereas a 'SunUp' female with XX chromosomes was used for whole genome shotgun sequencing to avoid the complication of assembling the heterozygous region of the X and Y
h chromosomes [
9].
Papaya belongs to the small family Caricacea and is in the order Brassicales. Papaya and
Arabidopsis diverged from a common ancestor about 72 million years ago. Thus, papaya can serve as an outgroup for comparative study of Brassicaceae genomes. Papaya has a small genome of 372 Mbp with nine pairs of chromosomes, a short juvenile phase of 3–8 months, and a short generation time of 9–15 months. Papaya is one of the few fruit tree crops that can flower and fruit throughout the year, providing a constant supply of flower buds and fruits. Each mature fruit contains 800–1000 seeds, and a single F1 tree could produce a large segregating F2 population for genetic studies. Clonal propagation can be done easily from cuttings or through micro-propagation. An efficient transformation system has been established as demonstrated by the success of transgenic papaya that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry [
12,
13]. These attributes make papaya an excellent model system for tropical fruit trees in which to study a number of biological processes, including sex chromosome evolution [
5,
7,
8], cell wall biosynthesis and degradation [
14], vegetative/reproductive growth phase transition, flower development [
15,
16], fruit development, fruit ripening, and post-harvesting physiology [
14].
Significant progress has been made in recent years in developing genomic resources to expedite genome research in papaya. A BAC library of 'SunUp' hermaphrodite was constructed with 13.7× genome equivalents, providing the foundation for studying papaya genome structure and organization [
11]. BAC ends of this library were sequenced [
17], providing the first glimpse of the sequence composition of the papaya genome. Two high-density genetic linkage maps have been constructed [
18,
19], providing essential tools for comparative genomic analysis, marker-assisted selection, and genomic dissection of complex traits. The first high-density genetic map of papaya was constructed with 1,501 markers, including 1,498 amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers, 2 morphological markers, and one transgenic marker [
18]. Although this map has high-density, it is not suitable for aligning papaya genome sequence to linkage groups and integrating genetic and physical maps due to the anonymous nature of AFLP markers. To overcome this limitation, highly informative sequence-based simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were used to construct the second high-density genetic map, containing 707 markers including 706 sequence-based SSR markers and one morphological marker [
19]. These SSR markers were developed from either BAC end or whole-genome shotgun sequence reads [
19], and this map is a crucial resource for integration of genetic and physical maps and the genome sequences.
Several methods have been developed for construction of physical maps, including hybridization-based [
20] and fingerprinting-based methods [
21]. Fingerprinting techniques have been widely used in construction of genome-wide physical maps. A number of techniques have been developed to generate fingerprints including the traditional agarose-gel, acrylamide gel, and automated capillary sequencer-based high-information-content fingerprinting methods [
21-
23]. After comparatively evaluating five fingerprinting methods, it was concluded that the high-information-content fingerprinting method with five enzyme digestion and SNaPshot labeling developed by Luo et al. [
22] is the most effective [
21]. We report here the construction of a BAC-based physical map of the papaya genome using high-information-content fingerprinting [
22]. Contigs on the physical map were aligned with the papaya genome sequence assembly through BAC-end sequences (BES).