Genome and Tissue-Specific Transcriptome of the Tropical Milkweed (<i>Asclepias curassavica</i>).

ABSTRACT: Tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) serves as a host plant for monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) and other insect herbivores that can tolerate the abundant cardiac glycosides that are characteristic of this species. Cardiac glycosides, along with additional specialized metabolites, also contribute to the ethnobotanical uses of A. curassavica. To facilitate further research on milkweed metabolism, we assembled the 197-Mbp genome of a fifth-generation inbred line of A. curassavica into 619 contigs, with an N50 of 10 Mbp. Scaffolding resulted in 98% of the assembly being anchored to 11 chromosomes, which are mostly colinear with the previously assembled common milkweed (A. syriaca) genome. Assembly completeness evaluations showed that 98% of the B

SUBMITTER: Feng H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11914377 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature