The new results are important because the garden cucumber is one of the most widely cultivated vegetable crops, and the species is among the few flowering plants whose genomes have been fully sequenced. According to Renner, "Our study would not have been possible without the resources of the Munich herbarium and Botanical Garden.
A large fraction of the plants we have been able to sequence was collected in India, Vietnam and Australia during the 19th century, and most were then forgotten in herbaria, that is, collections of dried plant specimens. Many of these come from locations that no longer have natural vegetation, for example, because they were collected at sites that now lie in built-up areas of cities like Hanoi."