AUTHOR=Vinay N. D. , Singh Kalpana , Ellur Ranjith Kumar , Chinnusamy Viswanathan , Jaiswal Sarika , Iquebal Mir Asif , Munshi Anilabha Das , Matsumura Hideo , Boopalakrishnan G. , Jat Gograj Singh , Kole Chittaranjan , Gaikwad Ambika Baladev , Kumar Dinesh , Dey Shyam Sundar , Behera Tusar Kanti 

TITLE=High-quality Momordica balsamina genome elucidates its potential use in improving stress resilience and therapeutic properties of bitter gourd

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=14

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2023.1258042

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2023.1258042

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=<sec><title>Introduction</title><p><italic>Momordica balsamina</italic> is the closest wild species that can be crossed with an important fruit vegetable crop, <italic>Momordica charantia</italic>, has immense medicinal value, and placed under II subclass of primary gene pool of bitter gourd. <italic>M. balsamina</italic> is tolerant to major biotic and abiotic stresses. Genome characterization of <italic>Momordica balsamina</italic> as a wild relative of bitter gourd will contribute to the knowledge of the gene pool available for improvement in bitter gourd. There is potential to transfer gene/s related to biotic resistance and medicinal importance from <italic>M. balsamina</italic> to <italic>M. charantia</italic> to produce high-quality, better yielding and stress tolerant bitter gourd genotypes.</p></sec><sec><title>Methods</title><p>The present study provides the first and high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly of <italic>M. balsamina</italic> with size 384.90 Mb and N50 30.96 Mb using sequence data from 10x Genomics, Nanopore, and Hi-C platforms.</p></sec><sec><title>Results</title><p>A total of 6,32,098 transposons elements; 2,15,379 simple sequence repeats; 5,67,483 transcription factor binding sites; 3,376 noncoding RNA genes; and 41,652 protein-coding genes were identified, and 4,347 disease resistance, 67 heat stress–related, 05 carotenoid-related, 15 salt stress–related, 229 cucurbitacin-related, 19 terpenes-related, 37 antioxidant activity, and 06 sex determination–related genes were characterized.</p></sec><sec><title>Conclusion</title><p>Genome sequencing of <italic>M. balsamina</italic> will facilitate interspecific introgression of desirable traits. This information is cataloged in the form of webgenomic resource available at <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://webtom.cabgrid.res.in/mbger/" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">http://webtom.cabgrid.res.in/mbger/</ext-link>. Our finding of comparative genome analysis will be useful to get insights into the patterns and processes associated with genome evolution and to uncover functional regions of cucurbit genomes.</p></sec>