Current Progress of Genomics for Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer

Ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer) is one of the most important medicinal plants and has been cultivated over 2000 years in Eastern Asia including Korea and China. Despite its pharmacological and agricultural importance, little genome information for this plant species has been known. Therefore, to uncover and understand its genome information, we have performed Ginseng Genome Project. As a part of this project, genome of a Korean elite ginseng cultivar Chunpoong was sequenced using NGS technology. As a result, genomic reads of 430 Gbp, corresponding to 144x genome coverage, were generated by pair-end sequencing and additional 21 Gbp reads were also generated by long-mate pair sequencing. Using these reads, we built three trial versions of genome scaffolds. Among them, the second version set assembled by using NGS_cell, SSPACE, and GapCloser included the best scaffold sequences with 15kb average length, 41kb at N50, and 3 Gbp total length. The three sets were validated by comparison with EST and BAC sequences to confirm their gene coverage and contiguity. For marker development, more than 14,000 SNP/InDel were discovered by comparison of reads and are being validated. For transcriptome analysis, various ginseng samples were analyzed and uniEST sequences were generated. In addition, gene families encoding enzymes for ginsenoside biosynthesis and transcription factors important for abiotic stress-response were identified from the draft genome scaffold sequences. In this presentation, we will introduce the detailed results of ginseng genomics. This work was supported by Next-Generation BioGreen21 Program (No.PJ008202), Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea.

* Corresponding author. Tel: +82 2 880 4547; Fax: +82 2 873 2056.

E-mail address: tjyang@snu.ac.kr (T-J. Yang)