Spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) is a diploid plant with n = 6 chromosomes (2n = 12) and is one of the world’s most important green leafy vegetables. The genus Spinacia is well suited for studying sex chromosome evolution because it is dioecious, has an XY sex determination system, and includes two wild species (She et al., 2023). The first chromosome-level spinach genome, assembled using next-generation sequencing reads in 2017, had only 47% of the sequence anchored to the chromosomes (Xu et al., 2017). In 2023, we reported a spinach genome (termed Sp_YY_v1), sequenced from a homozygous YY male of the inbred line 10S15 using Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) long reads. However, the assembly still contained 74 unmapped contigs (38.2 Mb) and 109 gaps (She et al., 2023). Similar limitations are also present in several recently assembled spinach genomes (Ma et al., 2022; She et al., 2023, 2024a, 2024b), and these incomplete genome assemblies have hindered the exploration of complex genomic regions such as centromeres and telomeres.

Plant Communications. 2025 Jun 7;6(9):101410.IF=11.6.

DOI:10.1016/j.xplc.2025.101410