Recently, reporters learned from the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences that the institute's innovative team for vegetable functional genomics, in cooperation with domestic and international peers, discovered that a change in the copy number of a large DNA sequence segment can determine the sex of cucumbers. The related results were recently published in the internationally renowned journal The Plant Cell.

According to the introduction, cucumber is a typical monoecious crop with unisexual flowers; most cucumber varieties have both female and male flowers at the same time, and only female flowers can develop into fruit. In Europe, some varieties are gynoecious lines, in which the entire plant bears only female flowers, and therefore they have high yield-increasing potential. The sex determination mechanism produced by gynoecious cucumber lines has long been a hot topic in domestic and international research. Multiple research teams have carried out extensive exploration around this issue, but a very clear answer had not been obtained.

The innovative team for vegetable functional genomics at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences conducted research based on the construction of a cucumber whole-genome variation map in 2013. The study found that gynoecious cucumber lines are caused by an increase in the copy number of a 30kb DNA fragment, and found that the increase in copy number should have first occurred in a cucumber material in East Asia, and later spread to Europe, forming higher-yielding cucumber varieties. The revelation of the genetic mechanism by which gynoecious cucumber lines arise has important guiding significance for further revealing the mechanism of sex determination, and has potentially important application value for breeding high-yield cucumber varieties in the future.

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