Unravelling Polyploidy: NGS Approaches to Sugarcane Genomics

The NGS era is providing unprecedented insight into the field of genomics. New technologies are enabling in-depth analysis of even highly complex genomes with a number of polyploid crop genomes recently being sequenced using this means. The extremely complex and highly polyploid genome sequence of sugarcane has yet to be determined by any means, however NGS technology is providing insight into sugarcane genomics.

This presentation will describe the outcomes of survey sequencing across 6 sugarcane genotypes using the Illumina short read sequencing platform. This work provided further details regarding genome composition and size across the sequenced genotypes, as well as comparative analysis of chloroplast genome sequence of each genotype.  Further work is currently underway to conduct high-coverage Illumina sequencing of the reference cultivar R570 with a whole genome shotgun approach as well as a BAC by BAC approach. Our work to date in BAC sequencing has demonstrated that high quality assemblies can be achieved with multiplexed samples on the Illumina platform, which suggest that this platform will prove the most cost-effective in a high-throughput BAC sequencing project for sugarcane.

The sugarcane genome sequence will, once determined, represent a powerful tool to improve sugarcane as a food/fuel crop and for further investigation of the mechanisms of polyploid genome evolution.