Abstract
BackgroundLuo-han-guo (Siraitia grosvenorii), also called monk fruit, is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family. Monk fruit has become an important area for research because of the pharmacological and economic potential of its noncaloric, extremely sweet components (mogrosides). It is also commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of lung congestion, sore throat, and constipation. Recently, a single reference genome became available for monk fruit, assembled from 36.9x genome coverage reads via Illumina sequencing platforms. This genome assembly has a relatively short (34.2 kb) contig N50 length and lacks integrated annotations. These drawbacks make it difficult to use as a reference in assembling transcriptomes and discovering novel functional genes.FindingsHere, we offer a new high-quality draft of the S. grosvenorii genome assembled using 31 Gb (∼73.8x) long single molecule real time sequencing reads and polished with ∼50 Gb Illumina paired-end reads. The final genome assembly is approximately 469.5 Mb, with a contig N50 length of 432,384 bp, representing a 12.6-fold improvement. We further annotated 237.3 Mb of repetitive sequence and 30,565 consensus protein coding genes with combined evidence. Phylogenetic analysis showed that S. grosvenorii diverged from members of the Cucurbitaceae family approximately 40.9 million years ago. With comprehensive transcriptomic analysis and differential expression testing, we identified 4,606 up-regulated genes in the early fruit compared to the leaf, a number of which were linked to metabolic pathways regulating fruit development and ripening.ConclusionsThe availability of this new monk fruit genome assembly, as well as the annotations, will facilitate the discovery of new functional genes and the genetic improvement of monk fruit.
Highlights
Siraitia grosvenorii is an herbaceous perennial native to southern China and is a famous specialty in Guilin city, Guangxi Province ofChina (Figure 1)[1]
Monk fruit has become important for research because of the pharmacological and economic potential of its non-caloric, extremely sweet components
Phylogenetic analysis showed that S. grosvenorii diverged from members of the Cucurbitaceae family approximately 40.9 million years ago
Summary
All datasets and code on which the conclusions of the paper rely must be either included in your submission or deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and ethically appropriate), referencing such data using a unique identifier in the references and in the “Availability of Data and Materials” section of your manuscript. Have you have met the above requirement as detailed in our Minimum Standards Reporting Checklist?. Mian Xia1, †, Xue Han2, †, Hang He2, †, Renbo Yu2, Gang Zhen, Xiping Jia, Beijiu Cheng1,* and Xing
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