1001 Genomes Plus (1001G+)

The 1001 Genomes Project, an informal international collaboration, has recently marked an important milestone, with the publication and analysis of 1135 Illumina short-read resequenced genomes of Arabidopsis thaliana from throughout the global range of the species. In the next phase, the consortium is building multiple platinum-standard de novo genome assemblies, primarily with PacBio long-read technology and BioNano optical mapping, as a further step towards a species-wide pan-genome and to discover a core set of common structural variants (SVs) in A. thaliana. The variants discovered from a comparison of these platinum-standard genome assemblies will then be typed in the 1135 Illumina short-read set, to describe the global distribution of SVs. This knowledge will further inform GWAS in this species, and advance our understanding of how SVs such as gene duplications, transpositions, deletions and transposable elements (TEs) shape the genetics and epigenetics of A. thaliana.