Sample collection and genome sequencing
The Qatar date fruit biobank is a collection of date fruit samples from
across the date palm growing region, including Qatar, United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia,
United States of America (USA), Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Oman and Spain
(N Stephan et al. 2018). We used 199 date fruit samples from the
collection, attempting to include the most important commercial
cultivars as well as some lesser-known varieties (Supplementary file 1).
DNA from fruit was extracted, sequencing libraries were constructed from
total DNA (Mathew LS et al., 2015) and sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq
2500/4000 instruments using 150 bp length reads. All sequencing steps
were done as described in Thareja et al (Thareja et al., 2018).