Euterpe oleracea Mart. is a perennial wetland palm native to the eastern Amazon that produces a fruit called açaí, which is used to prepare a beverage of great social and economic importance to the region. We have sequenced the açaí genome using Oxford Nanopore long-read platform and we have evaluated the gene expression of the fruit during the ripening process in both the white and purple varieties via RNA-Seq analysis. The assembled genome had a size of 3,066,969,163 bp, with the longest contig displaying 430,834 bp, a N50 of 54,646, and a GC content of 49.97%.The transcriptome analysis identified crucial genes that regulate the production of anthocyanins in purple açaí. For example, the up regulation of the flavonoid-3'5'hydroxylase enzyme plays a crucial role in the synthesis of purple anthocyanins, such as delphinidin 3-glucoside, between 70 and 130 days after flowering. In contrast, a general down regulation of the enzymes responsible for the initial stages of the anthocyanin synthesis was observed in the white variety. Our findings provide a valuable contribution to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms that regulate the ripening process of açaí fruits and present the first genome of Euterpe oleracea.
Barbosa et al. (Thu,) studied this question.