“Genomics of a. thaliana: Beyond Resequencing”

Arabidopsis thaliana was the first plant for which a very high-quality reference genome sequence was published, in 2000. A bit over fifteen years later, the 1001 Genomes Project last year marked an important milestone, the Illumina-short read resequencing of 1135 accessions collected from the global range of the species. To leverage this resource, the consortium has now completed multiple platinum-standard de novo genome assemblies, primarily with PacBio long-read technology. With these, a species-wide pan-genome is being built, for discovery of common sequences missing from the reference and for identification of a core set of common structural variants (SVs). These variants will be typed in the 1135 Illumina short-read set, to describe the global distribution of SVs. These efforts will serve as a blueprint for similar projects in crop species with larger and more complex genomes.