RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 The fruitENCODE project sheds light on the genetic and epigenetic basis of convergent evolution of climacteric fruit ripening JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 231258 DO 10.1101/231258 A1 Peitao Lü A1 Sheng Yu A1 Ning Zhu A1 Yun-Ru Chen A1 Biyan Zhou A1 Yu Pan A1 David Tzeng A1 Joao Paulo Fabi A1 Jason Argyris A1 Jordi Garcia-Mas A1 Nengui Ye A1 Jianhua Zhang A1 Donald Grierson A1 Jenny Xiang A1 Zhangjun Fei A1 Jim Giovannoni A1 Silin Zhong YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/19/231258.abstract AB Fleshy fruit evolved independently multiple times during angiosperm history. Many climacteric fruits utilize the hormone ethylene to regulate ripening. The fruitENCODE project shows there are multiple evolutionary origins of the regulatory circuits that govern climacteric fruit ripening. Eudicot climacteric fruits with recent whole-genome duplications (WGDs) evolved their ripening regulatory systems using the duplicated floral identity genes, while others without WGD utilised carpel senescence genes. The monocot banana uses both leaf senescence and duplicated floral-identity genes, forming two interconnected regulatory circuits. H3K27me3 plays a conserved role in restricting the expression of key ripening regulators and their direct orthologs in both the ancestral dry fruit and non-climacteric fleshy fruit species. Our findings suggest that evolution of climacteric ripening was constrained by limited availability of signalling molecules and genetic and epigenetic materials, and WGD provided new resources for plants to circumvent this limit. Understanding these different ripening mechanisms makes it possible to design tailor-made ripening traits to improve quality, yield and minimize postharvest losses.One Sentence Summary The fruitENCODE project discovered three evolutionary origins of the regulatory circuits that govern climacteric fruit ripening.