Pistachio genomes provide insights into nut tree domestication and ZW sex chromosome evolution Salih, Kafkas Robles Rodríguez, Francisca Ruiz Rejón, Carmelo Herrán Moreno, Roberto De La Navajas Pérez, Rafael García Zea, Jerson Alexander Pistacia vera Pistachio Sequencing Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacio´ n of Spain (project nos. AGL2009-09094 and RYC-2011-08653), the University of Granada (project no. PP2016- PIP13), and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province, China (project nos. 2021J01142 and 2018J01606) for providing financial support for this research. Pistachio is a nut crop domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and a dioecious species with ZW sex chromosomes. We sequenced the genomes of Pistacia vera cultivar (cv.) Siirt, the female parent, and P. vera cv. Bagyolu, the male parent. Two chromosome-level reference genomes of pistachio were generated, and Z and W chromosomes were assembled. The ZW chromosomes originated from an autosome following the first inversion, which occurred approximately 8.18 Mya. Three inversion events in the W chromosome led to the formation of a 12.7-Mb (22.8% of the W chromosome) non-recombining region. These W-specific sequences contain several genes of interest that may have played a pivotal role in sex determination and contributed to the initiation and evolution of a ZW sex chromosome system in pistachio. The W-specific genes, including defA, defA-like, DYT1, two PTEN1, and two tandem duplications of six VPS13A paralogs, are strong candidates for sex determination or differentiation. Demographic history analysis of resequenced genomes suggest that cultivated pistachio underwent severe domestication bottlenecks approximately 7640 years ago, dating the domestication event close to the archeological record of pistachio domestication in Iran. We identified 390, 211, and 290 potential selective sweeps in 3 cultivar subgroups that underlie agronomic traits such as nut development and quality, grafting success, flowering time shift, and drought tolerance. These findings have improved our understanding of the genomic basis of sex determination/differentiation and horticulturally important traits and will accelerate the improvement of pistachio cultivars and rootstocks. 2024-01-19T08:42:32Z 2024-01-19T08:42:32Z 2022 journal article Kafkas et al., Pistachio genomes provide insights into nut tree domestication and ZW sex chromosome evolution, Plant Communications (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xplc.2022.100497 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/86935 10.1016/j.xplc.2022.100497 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ open access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License