Yes, I assume that part of their study was figuring out which genes varied across the jujube samples, rather than randomly picking some and later finding that they were the same for most/all jujubes.
The other two contributors were Castanea and Cliff England.
There very much is a Li group. And a Lang group. Both are rather extensive.
There are actually 24 entries in the Li group, though a few are the same cultivar sent in by more than one person:
Looking at this, I just thought of a 7th question for Prof Yao. One of the things she mentioned was that 3 of the Li cultivars (Empress Gee, Allentown, and Weeping Li) differed on one of the 147 markers. She was assuming that it was an error in the genotyping. But I just noticed that there are two Empress Gee samples, one from me and one from Castanea. If it is a testing error, then one of the Empress Gee should match 147, while the other Empress Gee matches 146. If they both have the same 146, it isn’t a sampling error, it is a mutation on that one marker that differs from the rest of the Li group. She may not have noticed this, since the MO version is misspelled as Express instead of Empress.
This is what I was referring to earlier when I said that there may only really be 2 self-fertile cultivars, since most of the ones found in the pollination study fall into the Li group (plus Autumn Beauty).
Again, this doesn’t mean that all 24 are identical. They could differ just like “Pitless” vs “Jinsi 2”. Or the way that a modern dark red Red Delicious differs from the original Hawkeye Red Delicious. But my reading of the paper is that all the entries in the group started out as basically the same, possibly with a small tweak.
Maybe, maybe not. None of the differences are as strong as having a pit vs not, or the shape of the fruit. Size, quality, harvest date, etc all vary quite a bit with climate, tree age, pot vs in-ground, etc, and need some controlled situations to really measure. So we don’t know if there are other genes where some of the Sherwood group differ, or if they are all identical. The best evidence I see for differences is Tx Sawmill producing without pollination, but Sherwood not. Of course, I could easily see any given Sherwood just not producing for no reason at all (or maybe the bagging shaded the leaves just enough, etc) and it was just one year’s data (most of the cultivars had 2 year’s data), so it isn’t entirely conclusive.
You can find the full paper here:
2019 Data: