Whole Genome Sequencing of Eragrostis tef

Eragrostis tef is an allotetraploid cereal of central importance to the food security of the horn of Africa. The primary goal of the Tef Improvement Project is to provide new drought- and lodging- resistant cultivars to subsistence farmers in Ethiopia. Genomic sequencing of tef provides support for molecular breeding, enables the discovery of the genes and the networks responsible for important traits and allows comparison of the tef genome to those of other cereals. Currently, we have 50-fold coverage of the genome resulting in a genome size of 670 Megabases. Sequencing of a normalized library of the transcriptome revealed around 38,000 transcripts. This work was recently published in BMC Genomics.