Cracking the Genetic Code of the Lychee

There's more to a lychee than the sweet, delicate flavor of the flesh beneath its scaly pink-red skin. While lychee is not widely grown in North America, it's been a fixture in Chinese agriculture. They reached that conclusion by using the popular Fei Zi Xiao lychee as their reference genome, comparing its genes to about 70 other wild and farmed lychee cultivars. This allowed the researchers to map out the lychee's genetic evolution and trace its paths back to the first instances of it being farmed. The mutation controls when and how long a lychee tree flowers. A hybrid of both varieties, called the Fei Zi Xiao lychee, flowers early in June, but not as early as the original Yunnan lychees and not as late as the original Hainan variety. "To have its genome means that we can understand everything from the fruiting differences in the variety of lychees that exist, but we can also determine and find traits like tastes, fragrances, colors and pathogen resistance."