Development of chromosome-specific potential intron polymorphism markers in watermelon

Intron length polymorphism (ILP) marker is one of the popular molecular markers. Despite the effectiveness of ILP markers in some plants has been reported, while none in watermelon compared to others marker systems. In this study, a genome-wide survey of intron length markers for watermelon genome-annotated genes was performed. According to the genomic information of watermelon, the intron position was extracted by comparison with Arabidopsis thaliana, and the primers were designed by ePrimer3. A total of 51,585 potential intron polymorphism (PIP) markers spanning 11 watermelon chromosomes were identified and designed. All these PIP markers on the watermelon genome were verified by ePCR, and 50,093 (98.51