London Calling 2023: Exploring the genetic and functional diversity of the NLRome/resistome in melon using nanopore adaptive sampling

Nucleotide-binding-site-leucine-rich-repeat (NLR) disease resistance genes encode the most important family of plant resistance proteins. They are usually arranged in clusters that commonly present a high level of presence–absence polymorphisms. Therefore, long-read sequencing methods, such as Oxford  Nanopore sequencing, may provide valuable information. Nanopore adaptive sampling (NAS) is presumed to be a good approach, since sequencing of the entire genome is not necessary. Our project explores the implementation of NAS for the sequencing and characterization of the complete NLR-like resistance genes (or NLRome) in melon, using around 140 melon varieties. In a first step, we demonstrated the performance of NAS against whole-genome sequencing for the sequencing and assembly of previously defined NLR clusters in a well-studied melon variety. We also assessed the transferability of our design to other melon  varieties and plan to continue exploring the possibilities of this promising targeted sequencing approach.