Exceptionally low genomic diversity in the underutilised legume Kersting’s groundnut (<i>Macrotyloma geocarpum</i>)

Identifying crops with novel and climate resilience traits is imperative to ensure food security. Many of these underutilised crops suffer from a lack of international recognition and without some basic understanding of their genomes and genomic diversity they will remain to be underutilised, or could even become lost, without breeding programmes being able to utilise their diversity. Kersting’s groundnut (<i>Macrotyloma geocarpum</i> (Harms) Maréchal &amp; Baudet) is one such crop, regarded as a useful, drought tolerant and sometimes valuable legume which grows its beans underground akin to peanut. In this work, the genome of Kersting’s groundnut was sequenced and annotated and resequencing of a panel of accessions was carried out. We estimated the genome size to be small (1C = 365.4 MB) and 83.8% (306.4 MB) assembled into 10 pseudochromosomes, the haploid chromosome number. The genome is predicted to contain 33,193 genes, and 50.7% of the genome is composed of repetitive DNA.