New Approaches for sequencing complex plant genomes for de novo assembly

De novo assembly of large and complex eukaryotic organisms remains a major challenge to all current sequencing technologies, due to either short read length or high first pass error rate. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DNA Sequencing Laboratory and NRGene have partnered to take synergistic advantage of Illinois's custom library construction and DNA sequencing expertise and capabilities, paired with NRGene’s superior tools for genome assembly and trait discovery, to achieve high-quality genome assemblies of maize and other complex genomes of high agricultural importance. This presentation will feature a review of the latest chemistries and library developments and how these have been used to successfully assemble maize genomes, including the use of the Illumina's V4 chemistry, 250nt paired-reads, and the TruSeq Synthetic Long Read libraries used for phasing and de novo assembly.