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In this study, we aimed to develop novel genic simple sequence repeat (eSSR) markers and to study phylogenetic relationship among Pistacia species. Transcriptome sequencing was performed in different tissues of Siirt and Atlı cultivars of pistachio (Pistacia vera). A total of 37.5-Gb data were used in the assembly. The number of total contigs and unigenes was calculated as 98,831, and the length of N50 was 1,333 bp after assembly. A total of 14,308 dinucleotide, trinucleotide, tetranucleotide, pentanucleotide, and hexanucleotide SSR motifs (4-17) were detected, and the most abundant SSR repeat types were trinucleotide (29.54%), dinucleotide (24.06%), hexanucleotide (20.67%), pentanucleotide (18.88%), and tetranucleotide (6.85%), respectively. Overall 250 primer pairs were designed randomly and tested in eight Pistacia species for amplification. Of them, 233 were generated polymerase chain reaction products in at least one of the Pistacia species. A total of 55 primer pairs that had amplifications in all tested Pistacia species were used to characterize 11 P. vera cultivars and 78 wild Pistacia genotypes belonging to nine Pistacia species (P. khinjuk, P. eurycarpa, P. atlantica, P. mutica, P. integerrima, P. chinensis, P. terebinthus, P. palaestina, and P. lentiscus). A total of 434 alleles were generated from 55 polymorphic eSSR loci with an average of 7.89 alleles per locus. The mean number of effective allele was 3.40 per locus. Polymorphism information content was 0.61, whereas observed (Ho) and expected heterozygosity (He) values were 0.39 and 0.65, respectively. UPGMA (unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages) and STRUCTURE analysis divided 89 Pistacia genotypes into seven populations. The closest species to P. vera was P. khinjuk. P. eurycarpa was closer P. atlantica than P. khinjuk. P. atlantica-P. mutica and P. terebinthus-P. palaestina pairs of species were not clearly separated from each other, and they were suggested as the same species. The present study demonstrated that eSSR markers can be used in the characterization and phylogenetic analysis of Pistacia species and cultivars, as well as genetic linkage mapping and QTL (quantitative trait locus) analysis.

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The cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is octoploid (2n = 8x = 56) and has been the focused fruit species of which an increasing number of molecular and genetic research has been conducted in recent years. The aim of this study is to identify the relationships between sucrose metabolism, invertase enzyme activity and gene expression in four different fruit development periods (red, pink, green and white) of two commercially important strawberry varieties ‘Rubygem’ and ‘Fortuna’. The metabolite profiles (glucose, fructose, sucrose and total sugar content) of two varieties were discovered to be extremely similar. The highest amount of total sugar was found in red fruits, while the lowest was obtained from green fruits. Invertase represents one of the key enzymes in sucrose metabolism. The lowest invertase activity was obtained from the green fruits in ‘Rubygem’ and ‘Fortuna’ during four developmental periods. In these varieties, the amount of sucrose was found to be close to glucose and fructose and the lowest amount was detected in green period, while invertase activity was relatively high during red and pink periods and invertase gene expression was determined at high levels in both primers (St-4 and St-6) in the green period. The results of the study indicated that sugar content and invertase activity were positively correlated while enzyme activity and gene expression were negatively correlated.

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Introduction Juglans regia L. (walnut) is a monoecious tree crop with a haploid chromosome number of n = 16 and it belongs to the family Juglandaceae (Forde and Griggs, 1972). Although about 20 Juglans species are included in the genus, J. regia is considered most important owing to its edible nuts (Manning, 1978). Walnut is pollinated by wind (Rom and Carlos, 1987) and its origin is believed to be in Central Asia and neighboring regions (Browicz, 1976). Juglans species are also widely distributed in North and South America (Aradhya et al. 2007). In Europe, J. regia is the only commonly cultivated species of the genus. Turkey is considered as one of the origins of the species with a high production of nuts (212,140 t/year), which is fourth after China, the United States, and Iran (http://www.fao.org). Walnuts have high nutritional value and contain proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals and thus they are considered important for human nutrition (Gandev, 2007). Germplasm characterization, phylogenetic analysis, and genetic diversity studies in walnut have been conducted using a few molecular markers such as restriction fragment length polymorphisms (Fjellstrom et al., 1994), randomly amplified polymorphic DNAs (Nicese et al., 1998), intersimple sequence repeats (Potter et al., 2002), and amplified length polymorphisms and the selective amplification of microsatellite polymorphic loci (Kafkas et al., 2005). However, most of them were dominant with a lower level of allelic variation and less reproducible and thus have limited application in marker-assisted breeding programs (Ikhsan et al., 2016). Therefore, developing a codominant marker system in this species is necessary. Among the codominant markers, simple sequence repeats (SSRs) have been widely used across studies, including genotyping, parental identification, population genetics, and linkage map construction. In addition to the codominant nature, SSR markers are highly polymorphic, multiallelic, highly reproducible, and have good genome coverage. SSR marker development in Juglans was first attempted by Woeste et al. (2002) by using J. nigra genomic DNA. Hoban et al. (2008) reported 13 polymorphic microsatellite markers in J. cinerea, and Chen et al. (2013) developed 20 SSRs in J. mandshurica. Furthermore, several studies have Abstract: Walnut (Juglans regia L.) is the most important species in the genus Juglans due to the high commercial value of its nuts and timber. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are considered as the markers of choice owing to their codominant nature. Since very few SSRs have been developed in walnut, this study aimed to develop numerous polymorphic SSRs from Class I repeats by using DNA sequences of the Chandler cultivar. In all, 800 SSRs were designed and tested in 8 Turkish, 3 French, and 5 US walnut cultivars, of which 88 (11%) did not produce bands, 161 (20.1%) were monomorphic, and 551 (68.9%) were polymorphic. In all, 2696 alleles were produced by the 551 polymorphic SSR loci in the 16 walnut cultivars, ranging from 2 to 14 alleles ...