Draft Genome Assembly and Survey of Genetic Diversity within Lens culinaris

Lentil has minimal genomic resources available despite its growing production as a global food crop. Construction of a reference sequence provides a solid basis for further crop improvement through genomics assisted breeding and resequencing of close relatives. This will allow us to better understand the diversity from wild species that could be leveraged to improve crop cultivars. A lentil variety from the University of Saskatchewan's Crop Development Center, CDC Redberry, was chosen as a reference for sequencing. 125x shotgun sequencing will be performed using Illumina paired-end sequencing of varying fragment lengths, and mate-pair data from both Illumina and 454 technologies with a range of libraries from 2.7 to 40Kb will be produced. An initial draft of 23x paired-end coverage produced 2.7Gb of scaffolds out of an estimated 4Gb genome with an N50 of 44Kb. Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) was performed on a small panel of cultivars, allowing identification of the L. culinaris RIL populations with the highest degree of genetic diversity. Three of these populations will be chosen for GBS sequencing and further anchoring of scaffolds. The final assembly will be annotated with both RNAseq and computational gene prediction software, and selected cultivars of interest will be sequenced at ~30x coverage, with an additional survey of lentil genetic variability done by low-coverage skim sequencing.