Long-read bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) genome and the genomic architecture of domestication

Abstract

Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) is a vegetable and medicinal plant of the family Cucurbitaceae. Here we report a chromosome-level assembly, with highest contig N50 (close to 10 Mb) and proportion of sequences placed on chromosomes (96%) in Cucurbitaceae. Population resequencing revealed the divergence between wild and cultivars at about 6000 years ago. Different cultivar groups have distinct allelic compositions in loci associated with domestication traits, suggesting phenotypic changes were achieved by allele frequency shifts in independent loci. Noticeably, one candidate locus for fruit size locates within a region missing from a recent Illumina-based assembly. Despite breeding efforts to increase female flower proportion, the gynoecy locus exhibits high variation within and low differentiation between wild and cultivar groups, likely because artificial directional selection could not overwhelm natural balancing selection. Our study provides resources to further investigate the genetic architecture of bitter gourd as well highlights the importance of a well-assembled genome.