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Here, we report a high-quality draft genome of a Chinese radish (Raphanus sativus) cultivar. This draft contains 387.73 Mb of assembled scaffolds, 83.93% of the scaffolds were anchored onto nine pseudochromosomes and 95.09% of 43 240 protein-coding genes were functionally annotated. 184.75 Mb (47.65%) of repeat sequences was identified in the assembled genome. By comparative analyses of the radish genome against 10 other plant genomes, 2 275 genes in 780 gene families were found unique to R. sativus. This genome is a good reference for genomic study and of great value for genetic improvement of radish.

Sulforaphene, an isothiocyanate generated by the conversion of glucoraphenin in radish (Raphanus sativus L.), plays an important role in plants as a defensive compound and has been shown to have anti-cancer properties. However, a reliable method for the determination of sulforaphene in radish has not yet been established. In the present study, the enzymolysis conditions, extraction solvent and extraction conditions employed to obtain sulforaphene from radish were all optimized using single factor experiments and orthogonal testing. During these trials, sulforaphene was separated and quantified using reverse phase C18 high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), employing methanol:water (3:7 ν/ν) as the mobile phase at a flow rate of 0.3 mL · min−1 together with a detection wavelength of 245 nm. Evaluation of this newly established method showed good linearity between the sulforaphene concentration and the characteristic peak area over the range of 5 to 200 μg · mL−1 (R2 = 0.9996). This method was thus found to be precise. It was established that sulforaphene was extracted from radish with 95.48% efficiency (RSD = 0.94%) using the optimized conditions. This same technique was successfully applied to the quantification of sulforaphene in the fleshy roots of different radish germplasms as a means of selecting the germplasms with the highest sulforaphene levels.

The sex type of a cucumber plant is determined by the proportion of male, female and hermaphrodite flowers that it bears and is an important factor that affects fruit yield. In this paper, the sex types and seasonal sexual stabilities of 322 accessions of cucumber germplasm were identified. This germplasm collection displayed a great variety of sex types. We used an updated 10-type sex classification system based on the flower types present and the proportion of nodes with pistillate flowers (PNPF). The PNPF ranges of all the accessions were 2.12%–100% in spring and 0–100% in autumn. A total of 81.37% of the accessions had PNPFs of 10%–50% in spring, but most (84.78%) accessions were reduced to 0–20% PNPF in autumn. The range of reduction of PNPF from spring to autumn was 0–67.91%. In other words, most of the germplasm was normal monoecious (31.68%) or subandroecious (62.73%) in spring, but 94.10% of the accessions were subandroecious in autumn. According to the statistical evaluation of the difference in PNPFs between the two seasons, each accession could be classified into one of three groups: seasonally stable, seasonally sensitive and highly seasonally sensitive, accounting for 10.56%, 20.50% and 68.94% of the accessions, respectively. With a few exceptions, the seasonal PNPF differences were positively correlated with the PNPFs in a given season for most accessions. These results provided useful information and materials for sex expression mechanism research and for breeding cucumbers with high and stable yields.