Research Progresses on the Genomics of Cucurbitaceae Crops

Abstract

Cucurbitaceae family includes many common vegetables and fruits, and plays an important role in agricultural production. High quality genome is essential for gene mining of agronomically important traits, evaluation of germplasm resources and construction of molecular breeding system. With the rapid development of sequencing technology, Sanger, Roche 454, Illumina and PacBio sequencing platform had been established, which resulted in the continuous reduction of sequencing costs and many genomes of different species have been reported. Cucumber is a model crop for Cucurbitaceae crop research, and is the first vegetable crop to complete the genome sequencing. Subsequently, more and more Cucurbitaceae crops including watermelon, melon, pumpkin and winter gourd have completed the whole genome De Novo sequencing, which significantly improved research level of genomics, systematic evolution and molecular biology of Cucurbitaceae family. In this review, we summarized the progresses made on the De Novo sequencing of main Cucurbitaceae crops, and their application in understanding the origin and evolution of the family and mining genes controlling agronomically important traits. Moreover, we also prospected the construction of Telomerase-to-Telomere (T2T) genome and pan-genome of Cucurbitaceae family.

Keywords

• cucurbitaceae crop
• reference genome
• whole genome sequencing
• evolution
• agronomic traits
• gene mining