Identificação de variantes de nucleotídeo único associadas à diferenciação sexual em Carica papaya (Caricaceae)

Abstract

Papaya (Carica papaya) produces one of the most consumed fruits around the world. The papaya trade makes use of gynodioecious plants and for its cultivation to be most efficient as possible, it requires a greater proportion of hermaphroditic plants, considering that the fruits from female and male papaya trees are neglected by the consumer markets. The seeds available on the market produce male, female and hermaphrodite plants where the absence of strategies beyond molecular markers are still a limitation of papaya production. Knowing the molecular bases that influence the sex determination mechanism in papaya can help with the elaboration of strategies that assist the selection of hermaphroditic plants. This study was based on a bibliographic research that resulted in the consultation of more than 30 articles that address the approach of sex prediction and determination in papaya trees, we try to use a bioinformatics strategy to address the topic. An association study between genotypes and phenotypes was then carried out to find possible genetic factors involved in sex determination using resequencing data from 36 papaya samples (24 males and 12 hermaphrodites) obtained from public databases. The variant call was performed using the VarScan program, and the association studies were conducted using the PLINK program. In this analysis, 125,034 SNVs were found, where 406 of them were found to be significant. The results obtained so far constitute a starting point for further studies to progress in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of sex determination in C. papaya.