Extensive intraspecific gene order and gene structural variations between Mo17 and other maize genomes.

Authors: Sun, Silong and Zhou, Yingsi and Chen, Jian and Shi, Junpeng and Zhao, Haiming and Zhao, Hainan and Song, Weibin and Zhang, Mei and Cui, Yang and Dong, Xiaomei and Liu, Han and Ma, Xuxu and Jiao, Yinping and Wang, Bo and Wei, Xuehong and Stein, Joshua C and Glaubitz, Jeff C and Lu, Fei and Yu, Guoliang and Liang, Chengzhi and Fengler, Kevin and Li, Bailin and Rafalski, Antoni and Schnable, Patrick S and Ware, Doreen H and Buckler, Edward S and Lai, Jinsheng

Maize is an important crop with a high level of genome diversity and heterosis. The genome sequence of a typical female line, B73, was previously released. Here, we report a de novo genome assembly of a corresponding male representative line, Mo17. More than 96.4% of the 2,183?Mb assembled genome can be accounted for by 362 scaffolds in ten pseudochromosomes with 38,620 annotated protein-coding genes. Comparative analysis revealed large gene-order and gene structural variations: approximately 10% of the annotated genes were mutually nonsyntenic, and more than 20% of the predicted genes had either large-effect mutations or large structural variations, which might cause considerable protein divergence between the two inbred lines. Our study provides a high-quality reference-genome sequence of an important maize germplasm, and the intraspecific gene order and gene structural variations identified should have implications for heterosis and genome evolution.

Journal: Nature genetics
DOI: 10.1038/s41588-018-0182-0
Year: 2018

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