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Solanum pinnatisectum exhibits strong resistance to late blight caused by Phytophthora infestans but only an incomplete genome assembly based on short Illumina reads has been published. In this study, we generated the first chromosome-level draft genome for the wild-type potato species S. pinnatisectum in China using Oxford Nanopore technology sequencing and Hi-C technology. The high-quality assembled genome size is 664 Mb with a scaffold N50 value of 49.17 Mb, of which 65.87% was occupied by repetitive sequences, and predominant long terminal repeats (42.51% of the entire genome). The genome of S. pinnatisectum was predicted to contain 34,245 genes, of which 99.34% were functionally annotated. Moreover, 303 NBS-coding disease resistance (R) genes were predicted in the S. pinnatisectum genome to investigate the potential mechanisms of resistance to late blight disease. The high-quality chromosome-level reference genome of S. pinnatisectum is expected to provide potential valuable resources for intensively and effectively investigating molecular breeding and genetic research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resistance (R) gene Pi37, present in the rice cultivar St. No. 1, was isolated by an in silico map-based cloning procedure. The equivalent genetic region in Nipponbare contains four nucleotide binding site- leucine-rich repeat (NBS-LRR) type loci. These four candidates for Pi37 (Pi37-1, -2, -3, and -4) were amplified separately from St. No. 1 via long-range PCR, and cloned into a binary vector. Each construct was individually transformed into the highly blast susceptible cultivar Q1063. The subsequent complementation analysis revealed Pi37-3 to be the functional gene, while -1, -2, and -4 are probably pseudogenes. Pi37 encodes a 1290 peptide NBS-LRR product, and the presence of substitutions at two sites in the NBS region (V239A and 1247M) is associated with the resistance phenotype. Semiquantitative expression analysis showed that in St. No. 1, Pi37 was constitutively expressed and only slightly induced by blast infection. Transient expression experiments indicated that the Pi37 product is restricted to the cytoplasm. Pi37-3 is thought to have evolved recently from -2, which in turn was derived from an ancestral -1 sequence. Pi37-4 is likely the most recently evolved member of the cluster and probably represents a duplication of -3. The four Pi37 paralogs are more closely related to maize rp1 than to any of the currently isolated rice blast R genes Pita, Pib, Pi9, Pi2, Piz-t, and Pi36. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]