“…After the release of the watermelon genome (Guo et al , ), watermelon has become an ideal model crop for research on traits such as fruit cracking, size, shape, rind colour, and flesh texture due to being an annual and thus having a shorter life cycle than other perennial fruit crops. 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.…”