Development of Gap-Free Genome Assemblies to Capture and Exploit Rice Genetic Variation

Rice is the most important food crop in the world and will play a significant role in feeding 3 billion additional human inhabitants by 2050. CAAS/IRRI/BGI recently sequenced ~3000 diverse rice accessions and was able to subdivide these into 15 subpopulations that represent the majority of rice diversity across the globe. These accessions hold the key to the identification of QTL that can be used to breed the next generation of crops to meet the needs of the future. In order to capture the allelic diversity that exists across these 15 subpopulations, we are developing 2-3 ultra-high-quality reference genome assemblies for each subpopulation that can be used to identify SNPs and structural variants associated with agriculturally important traits. Here, we will present and discuss data for 5 new ultra-high-quality reference genome assemblies generated with PacBio long-read sequencing chemistry (i.e. RS2 and Sequel) for N 22, Zhenshan 97 (ZS97), Minghui 63 (MH63), Miracle rice (IR8) and Azucena.