Assembly and Validation of the Wild Emmer Wheat Genome

Wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides, genome BBAA) gene-pool is an important source for wheat research and improvement. The International Wild Emmer Wheat Genome Sequencing consortium (WEWseq - http://wewseq.wix.com/consortium) aims to explore this resource by providing cost-effective high quality genomic sequence. As a step towards achieving genome assembly of tetraploid wheat we hybridized durum wheat (T. turgidum ssp. durum, cv. Svevo) with wild emmer wheat and developed a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population. An ultra-dense genetic map was constructed by combing data from the wheat 90K iSelect SNP genotyping assay along with genotyping by sequencing (GBS) data. Next, we have performed paired-end (2 x 260 nucleotides) and mate-pair shotgun sequencing equal to about 190x genome coverage of the wild emmer accession 'Zavitan'. The short reads were assembled to scaffolds using NRGene's DeNovoMAGIC^TM2.0 assembler and cover ~90% of the genome with L₅₀ of 7 Mb and N₅₀ of 414. Most of the scaffolds were anchored to our genetic map more than 71,000 gene models were annotated. The integrity and quality of the genome assembly were assessed using different approaches and the latest results will be presented.