Researchers Release First Complete Telomere-to-Telomere Genome of Lettuce

A research team from Peking University Institute of Advanced Agricultural Sciences has published a complete telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome assembly of lettuce. In a paper published in Plant Communications, the team revealed for the first time the 2.59Gb T2T complete and gap-free genome sequence of lettuce.

The research also reveals the highly complex structural characteristics of the lettuce genome and the repetitive sequence characteristics of the centromere. Also for the first time, the three-dimensional genome conformation and epigenetic characteristics of lettuce are revealed, providing important insights into the complexity of the genome of higher plants. In addition, this study systematically predicted the disease resistance genes of the lettuce nucleotide-binding site leucine-rich repeat (NLR) family and analyzed their expression patterns in gray mold infection, providing new clues for the study of the disease resistance mechanism of lettuce.

The study used a highly pure Romaine lettuce variety PKU06 to generate a total of 112.4× coverage of PacBio high-fidelity (HiFi) long reads and 42.9× coverage of Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) ultra-long reads, as well as 118.8× coverage of Hi-C reads, for assembling the complete genome of lettuce. The final genome size is 2.59 Gb, Contig N50 is 320.7Mb, and 384 gaps in the Salinas version, which significantly improves the quality of the lettuce genome assembly.

For more details, read the article in Lifeasible.