A chromosome-level reference genome of the wax gourd (Benincasa hispida)

Abstract

The wax gourd (Benincasa hispida), the only species in the genus Benincasa, is an important crop native to Asia that has been widely planted for multi-purpose uses. The first wax gourd draft genome was published three years ago, but it was incomplete and highly-fragmented due to data and technical limitations. Herein, we report a new chromosome-level genome assembly and annotation of B. hispida. We generated 974.87 Mb of unitigs with N50 size of 2.43 Mb via a hybrid assembly strategy by using PacBio long reads and Illumina short reads. We then joined them into scaffolds with Hi-C data, resulting 1862 scaffolds with a total length of 975.62 Mb, and 94.92% of the length (926.05 Mb) is contained in the 12 largest scaffolds corresponding to the 12 chromosomes of B. hispida. We predicted 37,092 protein-coding genes, and 85.05% of them were functionally annotated. This chromosome-level reference genome provides significant improvement to the earlier version of draft genome and would be valuable resource for research and molecular breeding of the wax gourd.