A Genomic View of Rangpur Lime

Rangpur lime (Citrus limonia) is a vigorous plant whose tree is fast-growing and reaches 4.5 to 6 meters, showing a heavy and early bearing, character that makes it a very important rootstock in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Another very important characteristic of Rangpur lime is its high tolerance to water stress, which is essential for the Brazilian citriculture since it is poorly irrigated. It is a probable hybrid of lemon and mandarin that originated in India but very little genomic information is available for this species. In order to get a better view of its origin and also gain insights about its robustness, we did a genome sequencing of Rangpur lime. We used two different sequencing platforms, 454 and Illumina, and obtained 1,899,730,404 and 95,170,584,212 bases, respectively, resulting in a depth of coverage of 265 x. We assembled the reads in two steps, first with Newbler 2.6 and then with SOAPdenovo2. The resulting assembly was compared with the reference genome of Citrus clementinaand also with other available genomic sequences of citrus. Here we present the results obtained in these comparisons.

Financial support: FAPESP (08/57909-2), and CNPq (573848/08-4 and 475339/2011-8).