The shallow domestication bottleneck of strawberry: recovering secondary metabolite-based defenses from wild Fragaria species.

Authors

Sara Postacchini, Patricia Pacheco-Ruiz, Sonia Osorio, José G Vallarino, Bruno Mezzetti, Luca Mazzoni

Published in

Frontiers in plant science. Volume 17. Pages 1875182. Epub Jun 24, 2026.

Abstract

Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) domestication bottleneck is unique among major fruit crops with a domestication history of merely ~300 years. Unlike wheat, apple, or tomato, whose domestication spans millennia, this shallow bottleneck allows quantification and recovery of the metabolic diversity eroded during selection. The selection for commercial traits, such as color and dimension, inadvertently compromised plant resistance to biotic stresses by reducing key secondary metabolites involved in the defense mechanism. Since the last comprehensive survey of strawberry metabolome, new analytical platforms have substantially expanded the known chemical space of Fragaria. This review examines current multi-omics approaches, now aided by the availability of high-quality reference genomes for multiple Fragaria species, that enable in-depth characterization of the volatilome by GC-MS, integration of metabolome, transcriptome, and genome data, and high-throughput targeted and untargeted metabolomics. Additionally, this work provides evidence from recent studies on strawberry plants regarding their response to Botrytis cinerea and powdery mildew infections through the expression of specific genes, such as FvPR10.14, FaTPS1, and FnPR1B. Furthermore, recent screening of 18 Fragaria germplasms identified F. nilgerrensis as a resistant species against B. cinerea. Notably, genes involved in synthesizing defense compounds, such as terpenes, flavonoids, and ellagitannins, are still found in wild species like F. chiloensis, F. virginiana, F. nilgerrensis, and F. vesca. The recent domestication, crossability of wild progenitors, and the current availability of omics tools make Fragaria a particularly suitable system for recovering native chemical defenses, providing a sustainable alternative to reliance on fungicides.

PMID:
42422808
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 09 Jul 2026.

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