Advances in gene mapping studies in tree nut crops

Nut tree species have a great economic and cultural value for manycountries across the world. Their highly nutritious content makes them one of themost favourite healthy foods of the global population, with strong evidence of theirpositive impact on human health. Nut tree crops are very diverse in terms of nutchemical content and shape, growing climates, and domestication history. How-ever, all of them have a very long juvenile phase that makes classical breeding chal-lenging and time consuming. Also, their cultivation is very resource demanding.The application of genomic-assisted breeding can accelerate the development ofadaptive cultivars of nut tree species. In this article, we summarize recent successesin genomics for nut tree crops, specifically almond, chestnut, hazelnut, pecan, pis-tachio, and walnut. We report the recent discoveries on the genetic control of targettraits for the genetic improvement of these species, with suggestions for futuredirections and breeding applications