Summary of genome assembly project
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In the U.S., peanuts are an important crop in the U.S. southeastern states and southeastern states, partly due to the work of the African-American botanist George Washington Carver, who in the 1920s and 1930s promoted them as an alternative crop to cotton; he famously described about 300 different products made from peanuts, many of which he himself developed.

The peanut or groundnut (also known as groundnuts, earthnuts, goober peas, monkey nuts, pygmy nuts and pig nuts), is an annual herbaceous plant in the Fabaceae (legume or bean family) now grown in tropical and warm-temperate regions worldwide for its seeds and their oil. The seeds contain up to 50% oil making it one of the important oilseed crops in the world. After pollination, the flower stalks elongate, growing to 6 cm long, and push the developing pods into the ground, so that the fruit must be dug up from the soil to be harvested. The latin term hypogaea refers to this "below+ground" growth of the pod. Although appearing as and referred to as a nut, it is actually the underground pod of a legume, rather than a true nut. The fruit is an indehiscent legume (a pod that does not have sutures or split open freely), typically containing 1 to 3 soft seeds (sometimes as many as 6).

Origin:
Cultivated peanut originated and was domesticated in South and Central America 3-5 thousand years ago, derived all of its genetic material from two wild ancestors, A. duranensis and A. ipaensis whose genomes merged several thousand years ago, in a rare genetic event. The wild species, therefore, have half as much genetic material as cultivated peanut. These two “simpler” genomes have first been sequenced toward achieving its ultimate goal: the complete genomic sequence for cultivated peanut.

The cultivated peanut is an allotetraploid (AABB, 2n=4x=40) that carries the A genome from A. duranensis and the B genome from A. ipaensis. These two ancestral diploids separated from each other about 3 million years ago. The genome merger, allopolyploidy event, ocurred relatively very recently, five to ten thousand years ago, followed by domestication in South America from where it appeared in most part of the world by 1600.

More about Arachis ... (Download a short review on 'Arachis duranensis, Arachis ipaensis, and the Origins of Cultivated Peanut')
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