Tastier strawberries that are easier to grow could result from the first genetic map of the fruit’s wild cousin.

The genome of the woodland strawberry, Fragaria vesca, will help strawberry breeders develop disease-resistant strains.

It could also lead to improvements in fruit appearance and taste.

The woodland strawberry produces small fruits with an intense flavour, and was widely cultivated until about 250 years ago.

Then it was replaced by the garden strawberry, Fragaria X annassa, which bears larger fruit.

However, many of the woodland strawberry’s 35,000 genes are retained by its more popular relative.

Strawberries are a valuable food crop, with UK sales of British-grown fruits alone amounting to £231 million (€270 million) in 2009.

But cultivated strawberries are vulnerable to diseases, especially strawberry wilt.

Although varieties of disease-resistant strawberries exist, they fall below the quality standards expected by consumers. It is hoped access to the woodland strawberry genetic code will allow breeders to produce high quality varieties that can be treated with fewer pesticides. The wild strawberry is also closely related to apples, peaches, pears, raspberries, and roses.

An international team including British scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) carried out the research reported in the journal Nature Genetics.

Dan Sargent, one of the scientists from East Malling Research in Kent, said: “The wild strawberry is an important genome to sequence because it is closely related to a number of important things that we eat.

“Because farmers have been cross-breeding and hybridising food crops for centuries to improve traits like taste and nutritional value, they tend to have large complicated genomes, but the wild strawberry is relatively small, so we can get access to all of these useful genes comparatively easily.”

The scientists created a giant jigsaw puzzle from the chain of chemicals that make up the wild strawberry DNA.