Ancestral synteny shared between distantly-related plant species from the asterid (Coffea canephora and Solanum Sp.) and rosid (Vitis vinifera) clades

Thanks to a set of 867 COSII markers, macrosynteny was detected between coffee, tomato and grapevine. While coffee and tomato genomes share 318 orthologous markers and 27 conserved syntenic segments (CSSs), coffee and grapevine also share a similar number of syntenic markers and CSSs: 299 and 29 respectively. Despite large genome macrostructure reorganization, several large chromosome segments showed outstanding macrosynteny shedding new insights into chromosome evolution between Asterids and Rosids. We also analyzed a sequence of 174 kb containing the ovate gene, conserved in a syntenic block between coffee, tomato and grapevine that showed a high-level of microstructure conservation. A higher level of conservation was observed between coffee and grapevine, both woody and long life-cycle plants, than between coffee and tomato. Out of 16 coffee genes of this syntenic segment, 7 and 14 showed complete synteny between coffee and tomato or grapevine, respectively.These results show that significant conservation is found between distantly related species from the Asterid (Coffea canephora and Solanum sp.) and Rosid (Vitis vinifera) clades, at the genome macrostructure and microstructure levels. At the ovate locus, conservation did not decline in relation to increasing phylogenetic distance, suggesting that the time factor alone does not explain divergences. Our results are considerably useful for syntenic studies between supposedly remote species for the isolation of important genes for agronomy.Coffea is a large genus that belongs to the Rubiaceae family, the fourth largest family of angiosperms, in term of species number. To date, this genus encompasses 103 perennial species, all native to Africa, Madagascar, the Mascarene Islands and the Comoros Islands [1]. It includes two economically important species: C. arabica L. and C. canephora Pierre, which represent a major agricultural commodity in world trade and one of the main sources of foreign exchange for Southern co