Microbial contamination in the genome of the domesticated olive

Abstract

Draft genomes of both the wild and domesticated olive were recently published. While working with these genomes, we identified contamination in the domesticated olive genome representing .06% of basepairs and 1.3% of scaffolds. We used targeted and untargeted approaches to identify the contaminating sequences, the majority of which were Aureobasidium pullulans. We applied the same method to the wild olive genome and did not find evidence of contamination. Although contamination in the domesticated olive genome was not prolific, it could lead to biased results either from functional content encoded in the contaminant sequences, or from using it to separate microbial reads from olive reads in microbiome studies.