A Complete Pumpkin Genome Opens Door to Better Breeding

Pumpkin is a global food security crop prized for its nutritional value, stress tolerance, and long shelf life. Yet its remarkable diversity in fruit shape, size, flesh thickness, and sugar content has remained largely unexplored at the genetic level--because no high-quality reference genome existed. Now, researchers have assembled the first telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome of pumpkin (Cucurbita moschata), closing nearly all previous gaps and identifying 165 quantitative trait loci (QTL) linked