Book excerpt: The stone fruits—including peaches, apricots, almonds, plums, and cherries—have been bred and grown for thousands of years and today are significant agricultural crops in many local economies worldwide. This volume presents a comprehensive commentary on classical genetics and breeding, molecular mapping and breeding of agronomic traits, and the cloning of genes of interest. It also explores recent advances on omics sciences including structural and functional genomics, proteomics, nd metabolomics. The book enumerates the whole genome sequencing of the model fruit plant peach and discusses bioinformatic strategies and tools for stone fruit research