2014 ASHS Annual Conference

Vaccinium virgatum (syn V. ashei) is commonly known as rabbiteye blueberry and native to the Southeastern United States. Cultivars are typically grown from North Carolina south to Florida and west to Texas for commercial blueberry production.  In the Southeast, plants exhibit superior environmental tolerance and have fewer disease and insect concerns that highbush varieties (Vaccinium corymbosum), although some southern highbush (Vaccinium corymbosum X Vaccinium darrowii ) include V. virgatum in their genetic backgrounds. Extensive genomic work has been done on V. corymbosum, both diploid and tetraploid, but not much has been done with V. virgatum, which is hexaploid. Our study included five V. virgatum cultivars; TifBlue, Climax, PowderBlue, Austin, and Premiere. Tissues were collected from clonally propagated plants for each cultivar at multiple developmental stages including buds, berries, leaves, and roots. Tissue was also collected from root and leaves during drought treatments. First sequencing results were produced for all growth stages of ‘Premiere’ using Nextera kits and Illumina instruments.  Transcriptomes were compared to existing genomic resources for highbush to determine relative overlap.