Construction and comparative analyses of highly dense linkage maps of two sweet cherry intraspecific progenies of commercial cultivars

Sweet cherry (Prunus avium) is an important fruit tree crop. The construction of a sweet cherry genetic linkage map is important to facilitate quantitative trait locus analyses and gene tagging for marker assisted breeding programs. In this work, high‐density genetic maps for four parents and two F1 populations obtained from two intra‐specific crosses between ‘Black Tartarian’ × ‘Kordia’ (BT×K) and ‘Regina’ × ‘Lapins’(R×L) were constructed using the recently designed RosBREED 6K SNP chip. A total of 5,696 SNP markers were tested in each progeny, mapping 723 SNPs and 701 SNPs in the BT×K and R×L linkage maps, respectively. The resulting maps spanned 752.9 and 651.6 cM with an average distance of 1.1 and 0.9 cM between adjacent markers. The maps displayed high synteny and co‐linearity between each other and with the peach genome v1.0 for all eight linkage groups (LG1‐LG8). However, we identified inversions in sweet cherry genome when compared to the peach genome at LG1, LG5 and LG7. The highly dense linkage maps developed from these two segregating populations of contrasting cherry cultivars will be useful for further research in development of markers for economically important traits, based upon the haplotype segregation in the progeny