On Aug. 30, 2010, the genome sequence of the apple is published in Nature Genetics. Riccardo Velasco and colleagues sequenced and assembled the domesticated apple genome, which is approximately 742.3 million base pairs long. The genome assembly covers approximately 81.3% of the genome sequence.

Apple was the tenth plant genome to be sequenced, after Arabidopsis, rice, poplar, grape, papaya, sorghum, cucumber, maize, and soybean. A WGS ideally provides the identity of each nucleotide, in order for each chromosome, in a genome.

As this sequence is largely consistent across the nuclei of all living cells of an organism, the WGS fundamentally represents an organism’s internal genetic instructions. “Golden Delicious” was chosen to represent the crop from this genomic perspective because it is a century-old cultivar that remains popular in commercial production across the globe and is also highly prominent in the recent ancestry of a large proportion of modern apple cultivars.