Assembly of Two CCDD Rice Genomes, Oryza grandiglumis and Oryza latifolia, and the Study of Their Evolutionary Changes

Abstract

Every day more than half of the world consumes rice as a primary dietary resource. Thus, rice is one of the most important food crops in the world. Rice and its wild relatives are part of the genus Oryza. Studying the genome structure, function, and evolution of Oryza species in a comparative genomics framework is a useful approach to provide a wealth of knowledge that can significantly improve valuable agronomic traits. The Oryza genus includes 27 species, with 11 different genome types as identified by genetic and cytogenetic analyses. Six genome types, including that of domesticated rice - O. sativa and O. glaberrima, are diploid, and the remaining 5 are tetraploids. Three of the tetraploid species contain the CCDD genome types (O. grandiglumis, O. latifolia, and O. alta), which arose less than 2 million years ago. Polyploidization is one of the major contributors to evolutionary divergence and can thereby lead to adaptation to new environmental niches. An important first step in the characterization of the polyploid Oryza species is the generation of a high-quality reference genome sequence. Unfortunately, up until recently, the generation of such an important and fundamental resource from polyploid species has been challenging, primarily due to their genome complexity and repetitive sequence content. In this project, I assembled two high-quality genomes assemblies for O. grandiglumis and O. latifolia using PacBio long-read sequencing technology and an assembly pipeline that employed 3 genome assemblers (i.e., Canu/2.0, Mecat2, and Flye/2.5) and multiple rounds of sequence polishing with 5 both Arrow and Pilon/1.23. After the primary assembly, sequence contigs were arranged into pseudomolecules, and homeologous chromosomes were assigned to their respective genome types (i.e., CC or DD). Finally, the assemblies were extensively edited manually to close as many gaps as possible. Both assemblies were then analyzed for transposable element and structural variant content between species and homoeologous chromosomes. This enabled us to study the evolutionary divergence of those two genomes, and to explore the possibility of neo-domesticating either species in future research for my PhD dissertation.