Identification of Genes Responsible for Natural Variation in Volatile Content Using Next-Generation Sequencing Technology

Identification of the genes controlling the variation of key traits remains a challenge for plant researchers and represents a goal for the development of functional markers and their implementation in marker-assisted crop breeding. As an example we describe the identification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that segregate as single locus or mayor quantitative trait loci (QTL) in strawberry F1 segregating populations. Next, we describe a fast and efficient method for RNA extraction in strawberry that yields high-quality RNA for downstream RNA-seq analysis. Finally, two alternative methods for analysis of global transcript expression in contrasting lines will be described in order to identify the candidate gene and genes with differential expression using RNA-seq.