Integrative morphological, biochemical, and plastome-based characterization of a wild plum (Prunus spp.) population from Mount Erciyes (Central Anatolia, Türkiye)

Abstract Plums (Prunus spp.) are among the most diverse fruit tree species, yet their wild relatives remain poorly characterized despite their importance for breeding, conservation, and understanding evolutionary diversity. Here, we investigated a wild plum population from Mount Erciyes, located in Central Anatolia, Türkiye, through integrated morphological, textural, total content-based biochemical, and plastome analyses. Floral morphology of the Erciyes wild plums displayed intermediate features between apricot (P. armeniaca) and cultivated plum (P. domestica), while fruit texture exhibited significantly higher peel hardness and flesh resistance compared with the reference cultivar ‘Papaz Eriği’. Illumina sequencing of the chloroplast genome produced a 157,840 bp plastome with a conserved quadripartite structure, encoding 125 genes. Comparative analyses revealed minor structural differences in the LSC and SSC regions, whereas the IR regions remained highly conserved. Phylogenetic reconstruction based on complete plastomes clustered the Erciyes wild plums with P. domestica and P. cerasifera, reflecting plastome-level phylogenetic affinity. This study identified significant phenotypic and total content-based biochemical diversity in wild plum genotypes. Key traits such as fruit and seed weight, color, and bioactive compound contents showed wide variability. Based on the heatmap hierarchical clustering analysis, the genotypes and the examined traits were divided into two main groups exhibiting significant positive and negative correlations among the traits. Together, these findings provide a characterization of a previously undocumented wild plum from Mount Erciyes and establish a baseline reference for future studies on plum evolution, conservation, and breeding.