“…With the advancement of next‐generation sequencing (NGS) technology, sequencing‐based gene mining strategies, such as bulk segregant analysis (BSA), genetic mapping and genome‐wide association study (GWAS), have been widely used as affordable, efficient and routine approaches to dissect crop traits in rice (Wang et al , ) tomato (Chapman et al , ; Soyk et al , ), cucumber(Li et al , ; Xu et al , ), peanut(Luo et al , ), chickpea(Deokar et al , ),spinach(She et al , ), apple(Jia et al , ) and melon (Hu et al , ). Recently, genes or QTLs related to sugar transporter (Ren et al , ), dwarfism (Dong et al , ) and lobed leaves (Wei et al , ) have been reported in watermelon. However, the genetic dissection of rind hardness has not been reported and remains a knowledge gap in fresh fruits such as watermelon.…”