About MbGeR

Momordica balsamina is considered as closest wild species that can be crossed with Momordica charantia and placed under II subclass of primary gene pool of bitter gourd. M. balsamina also possesses high level of tolerance to major insect pests and diseases such as yellow mosaic and little leaf disease. Genome characterization of M. balsamina as wild relative of bitter gourd will contribute to the knowledge of the gene pool available to use in bitter gourd improvement through advanced plant breeding techniques. There are potential chances to transfer gene/s or traits related to biotic resistance and of medicinal importance from M. balsamina to M. charantia for the production of high quality and yielding resistant bitter gourd varieties. Therefore, the present study provided the first and high-quality chromosome level genome assembly of M. balsamina with size 384.90Mb and N50 30.96Mb using sequence data from 10x Genomics, Nanopore and Hi-C platforms. A sum of 600803 TEs, 3096 noncoding RNA genes, and 51867 protein coding genes were identified and 4421 disease resistance, 70 heat stress related, 15 salt stress related, 237 cucurbitacin related, 20 terpenes related, 37 antioxidant activity, and 06 sex determination related genes were characterized among protein coding genes. Genome sequencing of M. balsamina will help in identifying higher number of genome wide markers with greater specificity and accuracy to trace the introgressed segments, which is vital in interspecific introgression breeding. All the findings from the present study were also added in a web-resource to be utilized by scientific communities for further studies.