During the last decade, the high-density marker map based on the F2 progeny of the ‘Texas’ almond and ‘Earlygold’ peach (TxE) cross has been a resource for the Prunus scientific community. TxE has been used to identify markers for the construction of anchored linkage maps in crosses involving peach and other Prunus and mapping major genes and QTLs on them, for fast mapping of markers or candidate genes with the bin mapping approach, for the comparison of maps with other rosaceous crops, for physical map construction, and recently as one of the reference maps employed for the alignment of the peach genome assembly. Once the peach genome sequence has become available, a new and more powerful avenue for most of these applications is open. This communication will present some of the new ways in which this population, and others derived from the ‘Texas’ x ‘Earlygold’ hybrid, are currently being used for a better understanding of the Prunus genome and the genetics of characters of interest for plant breeding. This will include: a) the new maps of TxE and the first backcross progeny to peach (T1E population) based on the 9k IPSC peach SNP chip, b) the resequencing of individuals of T1E to find the precise positions of recombination breakpoints, and c) the use of these two populations to study the inheritance of a broad set of characters and to identify alleles of almond which may be valuable for peach improvement.
