Apple native to NA?

A few weeks ago I just had to figure out where strawberries originated. I didn’t locate any research that addressed that issue, but I did find a 2002 paper that asserts that apples are native to North America. It is entitled The origin of the apple subfamily (Maloideae; Rosaceae) is clarified by DNA sequence data from duplicated GBSSI genes and is at this url. Go to the extended entry at AppleTalk for the article abstract. —Michelle

Abstract
For 70 yr the leading hypothesis for the origin of the Maloideae has involved wide hybridization between ancestors of two other subfamilies. The basis of this hypothesis is that Maloideae have a base chromosome number of 17, whereas other Rosaceae are mostly x = 7, 8, or 9. To investigate this hypothesis we cloned and sequenced approximately 1.8 kilobases from the 5′ portion of granule-bound starch synthase (GBSSI, or waxy) genes for 89 clones from 32 Rosaceae genera. Previous studies demonstrate the presence of two copies in all Rosaceae (GBSSI-1 and GBSSI-2) and four in Maloideae (GBSSI-1A, GBSSI-1B, GBSSI-2A, and GBSSI-2B). Parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses nest Gillenia, a genus of the southeastern United States with a base chromosome number of 9, within either Maloideae GBSSI-1 or GBSSI-2. Monophyly of Maloideae plus Gillenia is well supported by bootstrap values, loss of the sixth intron in all GBSSI-1 sequences, intron alignability between genera, and numerous nonmolecular characters. Our results falsify the wide-hybridization hypothesis and are consistent with a polyploid origin involving only members of a lineage that contained the ancestors of Gillenia. Under this hypothesis, the subfamily originated in North America, and the high Maloideae chromosome number arose via aneuploidy from x = 18.
Key Words: Gillenia, hybridization, low-copy-number nuclear genes, Maloideae origin, Rosaceae