De novo assembly, annotation, and comparative analysis of 26 diverse maize genomes.

Hufford MB, Seetharam AS, Woodhouse MR, Chougule KM, Ou S, Liu J, Ricci WA, Guo T, Olson A, Qiu Y, Della Coletta R, Tittes S, Hudson AI, Marand AP, Wei S, Lu Z, Wang B, Tello-Ruiz MK, Piri RD, Wang N, Kim DW, Zeng Y, O'Connor CH, Li X, Gilbert AM, Baggs E, Krasileva KV, Portwood JL, Cannon EKS, Andorf CM, Manchanda N, Snodgrass SJ, Hufnagel DE, Jiang Q, Pedersen S, Syring ML, Kudrna DA, Llaca V, Fengler K, Schmitz RJ, Ross-Ibarra J, Yu J, Gent JI, Hirsch CN, Ware D, Dawe RK

Published: 7 August 2021 in Science (New York, N.Y.)
Keywords: No keywords in Pubmed
Pubmed ID: 34353948
DOI: 10.1126/science.abg5289

We report de novo genome assemblies, transcriptomes, annotations, and methylomes for the 26 inbreds that serve as the founders for the maize nested association mapping population. The number of pan-genes in these diverse genomes exceeds 103,000, with approximately a third found across all genotypes. The results demonstrate that the ancient tetraploid character of maize continues to degrade by fractionation to the present day. Excellent contiguity over repeat arrays and complete annotation of centromeres revealed additional variation in major cytological landmarks. We show that combining structural variation with single-nucleotide polymorphisms can improve the power of quantitative mapping studies. We also document variation at the level of DNA methylation and demonstrate that unmethylated regions are enriched for cis-regulatory elements that contribute to phenotypic variation.