High-quality genome elucidates its potential use in improving stress resilience and therapeutic properties of bitter gourd.

Introduction: is the closest wild species that can be crossed with an important fruit vegetable crop, , has immense medicinal value, and placed under II subclass of primary gene pool of bitter gourd. is tolerant to major biotic and abiotic stresses. Genome characterization of 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 to to produce high-quality, better yielding and stress tolerant bitter gourd genotypes.

Methods: The present study provides the first and high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly of with size 384.90 Mb and N50 30.96 Mb using sequence data from 10x Genomics, Nanopore, and Hi-C platforms.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: Genome sequencing of will facilitate interspecific introgression of desirable traits. This information is cataloged in the form of webgenomic resource available at http://webtom.cabgrid.res.in/mbger/. 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.