Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Linkage Disequilibrium of a Core Collection of Ziziphus jujuba Assessed with Genome-wide SNPs Developed by Genotyping-by-sequencing and SSR Markers

Chinese jujube ( Ziziphus jujuba Mill) is an economically important fruit species native to China with high nutritious and medicinal value. Genotyping-by-sequencing was used to detect and genotype single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a core collection of 150 Chinese jujube accessions and further to characterize their genetic diversity, population structure, and linkage disequilibrium (LD). A total of 4,680 high-quality SNPs were identified, of which 38 sets of tri-allelic SNPs were detected. The average polymorphism information content (PIC) values based on bi-allelic SNPs and tri-allelic SNPs were 0.27 and 0.38, respectively. STRUCTURE and principal coordinate analyses based on SNPs revealed that the 150 accessions could be clustered into two groups. However, neighbor-joining trees indicated the accessions should be grouped into three major clusters. Our data confirm that the resolving power for genetic diversity was similar for the SSRs and SNPs. In contrast, regarding population structure, the resolving power was higher for SSRs than for SNPs. The LD pattern in Chinese jujube was investigated for the first time. We observed a relatively rapid LD decay with a short range (∼10 kb) for all pseudo-chromosomes and for individual pseudo-chromosomes. Our findings provide important information for future genome-wide association analyses and marker-assisted selective breeding of Chinese jujube.