05, using selleck chem Perifosine the Graphpad Prism statistical package. Melon belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family, which comprises 130 genera, including approxi mately 800 species that are mainly found in temperate, subtropical and tropical regions worldwide. Besides melon, the Cucurbitaceae family also consists of many other economically important species, including cucum ber, watermelon, squash and pumpkin. Economically, melon is among the most important fleshy fruits for fresh con sumption. Indeed, melon is one of Americas, Europes and the Middle Easts favorite fruits for dessert and salad uses because of its unique flavor. The average per capita consumption of melon in the U. S. has been increasing consecutively each decade since the 1960s with 2000 2006 average per capita consumption exceed ing 12 pounds per year, an 8% rise from 1990 1999.

Besides its economic importance, melon is a very useful experimental system for fundamental studies on a range of topics including sex determination and vascular biology. In addition, melon is also an intensively studied species in terms of fruit ripening. It exhibits extreme diversity for fruit traits and includes a wide variety of cultivars producing fruits differing in many traits including fruit shape, size, flesh color, sweetness, aroma volatiles and fruit texture. In addition, melon fruits also have significant variations in ripening physiol ogy and can be categorized as either climacteric or non climacteric types based on their ripening related respira tion rate and ethylene evolution profiles.

Extensive molecular and genetic studies have been carried out in recent years in order to better understand the regulatory mechanisms underlying important traits of melon with the aim to improve melon fruit quality Melon is a diploid species with an estimated genome size of 450 Mb. Genetic and genomic tools available in melon include BAC libraries, a phy sical map, high resolution genetic maps, oligo based microarrays, and a TILLING platform for functional studies. Currently the melon genome is being sequenced under the Spanish Genomics Initia tive and the genome sequencing should be completed in the near future. The sequence of the closely related cucumber genome is available. Complementary to whole genome sequences, expressed sequence tags can directly represent the tran scriptome or transcribed portions of the genome.

They have played significant roles in rapid gene discovery, improving genome Brefeldin_A annotation, elucidating phylogenetic relationships, facilitating breeding programs, and large scale expression analysis. Currently in the NCBI dbEST database, there are approximately 35,000 melon ESTs, most of which were produced by Gonz lez Ib��as et al. Approximately 8,000 ESTs are available for cucumber and watermelon, respectively, and a total of approximately 1,000 EST from other cucurbit species.