Gapless assembly of maize chromosomes using long read technologies

Jianing Liu; Arun Somwarpet Seetharam; Kapeel M. Chougule; Shujun Ou; Kyle W Swentowsky; Jonathan Isaiah Gent; Víctor Llaca; Margaret Roth Woodhouse; Nancy Manchanda; Gernot G. Presting; David A. Kudrna; Magdy Alabady; Candice N. Hirsch; Kevin A. Fengler; Doreen Ware; Todd P. Michael; Matthew B. Hufford; R. Kelly Dawe

doi:10.1186/s13059-020-02029-9

BioinformaticsGenome biologyMay 20, 2020

Peer-reviewed journal article

Gapless assembly of maize chromosomes using long read technologies

Jianing Liu iD, Arun Somwarpet Seetharam iD, Kapeel M. Chougule iD, Shujun Ou iD, Kyle W Swentowsky iD, Jonathan Isaiah Gent iD, Víctor Llaca iD, Margaret Roth Woodhouse iD, Nancy Manchanda iD, Gernot G. Presting, David A. Kudrna iD, Magdy Alabady iD, Candice N. Hirsch iD, Kevin A. Fengler iD, Doreen Ware iD, Todd P. Michael iD, Matthew B. Hufford iD, R. Kelly Dawe iD

Abstract

Creating gapless telomere-to-telomere assemblies of complex genomes is one of the ultimate challenges in genomics. We used long read technologies and an optical map based approach to produce a maize genome assembly composed of only 63 contigs. The B73-Ab10 genome includes gapless assemblies of chromosome 3 (236 Mb) and chromosome 9 (162 Mb), multiple highly repetitive centromeres and heterochromatic knobs, and 53 Mb of the Ab10 meiotic drive haplotype.

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