Jigao Yu , Jinyu Wang , Jianyu Wang , Jinpeng Wang

School of Life Science, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, 063210, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Molecular Evolution and Biodiversity, 2020, Vol. 10, No. 4   
Received: 30 May, 2020    Accepted: 06 May, 2020    Published: 06 May, 2020

This article was first published in 《分子植物育种》(ISSN1672-416X，CN46-1068/S) in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Pumpkin is rich in vitamins and has high nutritional value. Sequencing of two cultivars Chinese pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata Duch.) and Indian pumpkin (Cucurbita maxima Duch.) was completed, which provided basic materials for the comparative genomic analysis of pumpkins. In this article, the wax gourd (Benincasa hispida), more conservative in the Cucurbitaceae, and the grape (Vitis vinifera L.) were used as reference genomes to carry out an in-depth analysis of the two pumpkin genomes. We confirmed that pumpkin shared cucurbit-common tetraploidization event (CCT) and Cucurbita specific tetraploidization event (CST). Through detailed genomic structure and colinearity analysis, we found that about 11% of the duplicate genes were generated by CCT, while associated with CST accounted for about 40% of the entire pumpkin genome. Using grape and wax gourd as references, the multiple genomes alignment table related to the polyploidization and species differentiation was constructed around pumpkins. In addition, polyploidy has an important contribution to the important gene families. Taking 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid synthase (ACS) is as an example, it is analyzed that different polyploidy events play different roles in its copy number changes. This study provides clear evidence of genomic homology analysis for understanding the pumpkin polyploidy process, and provides an important basis for comparative genomics for the study of pumpkin genome formation and gene evolution.

Cucurbitaceae; Pumpkin; Polyploidy; Homologous collinearity; ACS