*3.1.4. Eggplant*

Eggplant or brinjal (*S. melongena* L.), an autogamous diploid (2*n* = 2*x* = 24), is the third most important vegetable crop from the genus *Solanum* after potato (*S. tuberosum*) and tomato (*S. lycopersicum*). The eggplant is widely grown in Asia, the Middle and Near East, Southern Europe, and Africa [54]. The eggplant fruit serves as an excellent source of antioxidants like anthocyanin and phenolics [55, 56] and the tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses [57]. Therefore, several genetic studies have been carried out from the last two decades targeting various fruit traits such as size/shape and color. Moreover, the different origin of eggplant from other Solanaceae spp. makes it an important crop for comparative and evolutionary studies. In this regard, various aspects have been focused by researchers such as the develop‐ ment of genetic resources like molecular markers and genetic map that have been utilized for comparative analysis with other spp. of the Solanaceae family. The eggplant belongs to the *Leptostemonum* clade, which is far lagged behind the potato and tomato (potato clade) in terms of the development of genomic resources as only a total of 226,664 nucleotide sequences were available in NCBI database, of which majority (98,086) were obtained from ESTs generated by Fukuoka et al. [58]. These 98,086 ESTs were assembled into 16,245 unigenes that covered only a limited portion of eggplant transcriptome. Later, transcriptome sequencing was carried out using Illumina sequencing and reads were assembled into contigs using Trinity program [59]. Of these, 80% (27,393) of unigenes showed matches with the sequences available in NCBI nr database. A total of 29,717 genes were functionally annotated. A comparison of eggplant with 11 plant proteomes resulted in 276 high-confidence single-copy orthologous groups and revealed that eggplant and its wild *Leptostemonum* clade relative "turkey berry" split ~6.66 million years ago in the late Miocene and the *Leptostemonum* split ~15.75 Mya from the potato clade in the middle Miocene.
