High Quality Assembly of the Durum Wheat Genome cv. Svevo

Durum wheat with a total production of about 35 million tons is the 10^th most important crops worldwide. It is an integral component of the Mediterranean diet and one of the historical foods that followed the birth of civilization, likely to be one of the first domesticated crops in the Fertile Crescent. An international consortium has generated a high quality reference sequence of the modern durum wheat cultivar Svevo. Whole genome libraries were sequenced with Illumina short paired-end (2 x 250 bp) and long mate pair (up to 8-10 kb) protocols and the reads were assembly with the NRGene DeNovoMAGIC^TM pipeline. In total, a 270x coverage was obtained, and the reads were assembled into 10.5 Gb of sequence with an L50 and L90 length of 6 and 1 Mb, respectively (N50: 493; N90: 2019). The assembly scaffolds have been anchored to a high-density genetic map based on Svevo × Zavitan RIL population and merged into super-scaffolds using Hi-C data; 95% of the scaffolds have been anchored along the chromosomes and 90% oriented. The annotation of the assembled genome implemented with extensive transcriptomic data has been completed and more than 60,000 gene models were annotated. The availability of the durum wheat genome allows to highlight the genomic variations associated with the transition from wild emmer to durum wheat as well as the genome rearrangements between the A and B genomes of durum and the corresponding genomes of the hexaploid wheat. The work was supported by the Flagship project Interomics.