On Nov. 1, 2009, an international consortium lead by Chinese and U.S. institutions announced they had sequenced the genome of the cucumber.

The study established that five of the cucumber’s seven chromosomes arose from fusions of ten ancestral chromosomes after divergence from Cucumis melo. The sequenced cucumber genome afforded insight into traits such as its sex expression, disease resistance, biosynthesis of cucurbitacin and ‘fresh green’ odor.

The study identified 686 gene clusters related to phloem function. The cucumber genome provides a valuable resource for developing elite cultivars and for studying the evolution and function of the plant vascular system.  The Cucumber is an economically important crop as well as a model system for sex determination studies and plant vascular biology. The study findings were published in Nature.