Joseph VericaMark J. GuiltinanDapeng ZhangAntonio Figueira2014-04-092014-04-092008Genomics of Tropical Crop Plants,2008,145-170http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/338Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree. is an important tropical tree-cropthat provides sustainable economic and environmental benefits to some of the poor-est and most ecologically sensitive areas of the world. Recent progress in thedevelopment of genomics tools for cacao is reviewed. These include a referencemolecular genetic map, simple sequence repeats and other molecular markers, twogermplasm databases with microsatellite DNA fingerprints and other moleculardata, many quantitative trait loci mapping projects which have identified disease re-sistance and yield component loci, several expressed sequence tag resources, a cacaomicroarray, bacterial artificial chromosome libraries, and a genetic transformationsystem. The evolutionary relatedness of cacao with other important crops and modelplant systems positions cacao genomics to play a significant role in translationalplant genomics. The future prospects for the contribution of cacao genomics to im-provement of this crop for sustainable cacao production and as a tool for povertyalleviation and environmental stabilization are discussed.enArticle