Fragaria vesca,the diploid woodland strawberry,is an emerging model system for both the commercial,octoploid strawberry and the Rosaceae,a family that contains many economically important fruit crops.F.vesca has a small,sequenced genome(240 Mb),is amenable to transformation,and is easily grown in the lab.The fleshy fruit is unique in that it develops from the floral receptacle.Previously,our lab generated a two-dimensional(spatial and temporal)transcriptome dataset via RNA-Seq to profile strawberry flower and early stage fruit development before and after fertilization.To identify genes involved in the development of strawberrys fleshy fruit,we used the DESeq and edgeR packages in R and a Matlab filtering approach to identify genes with up-regulated expression in the fleshy fruit versus in all other profiled tissues.We identified 581 such genes.Using Gene Ontology(GO)term enrichment analysis,we found that genes contributing to processes such as secondary shoot formation and sequence-specific DNA binding are overrepresented in our dataset,indicating that these processes are critical for early fruit development.One of the 581 identified genes is an F.vesca homolog of FLOWERING LOCUS T(FT).Using genetic approaches,we are investigating what roles a homolog of FT,a gene crucial for floral initiation in Arabidopsis,may play in strawberry fruit development.To validate the utility of the promoters of these fruit-specific genes,four such promoters were isolated and used to drive expression of the GUS reporter in transgenic strawberry.To identify cis-regulatory elements that are enriched in the promoters of these 581 fruit-specific genes,we analyzed promoter sequences using Weeder,a novel motif discovery tool.The identification of fleshy fruitspecific genes,characterization of their promoters,and the identification of enriched motifs in fruit-specific promoters provide molecular tools for further functional studies of fleshy fruit development.