Publications

Genome biology. 2020-05-20; 21.1: 121.

Gapless assembly of maize chromosomes using long-read technologies

Liu J, Seetharam AS, Chougule K, Ou S, Swentowsky KW, Gent JI, Llaca V, Woodhouse MR, Manchanda N, Presting GG, Kudrna DA, Alabady M, Hirsch CN, Fengler KA, Ware D, Michael TP, Hufford MB, Dawe RK

PMID: 32434565

Abstract

Creating gapless telomere-to-telomere assemblies of complex genomes is one of the ultimate challenges in genomics. We use two independent assemblies and an optical map-based merging pipeline to produce a maize genome (B73-Ab10) composed of 63 contigs and a contig N50 of 162 Mb. This genome includes gapless assemblies of chromosome 3 (236 Mb) and chromosome 9 (162 Mb), and 53 Mb of the Ab10 meiotic drive haplotype. The data also reveal the internal structure of seven centromeres and five heterochromatic knobs, showing that the major tandem repeat arrays (CentC, knob180, and TR-1) are discontinuous and frequently interspersed with retroelements.

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