Assembling genomes of non-model plants: A case study with evolutionary insights from Ranunculus (Ranunculaceae)

Whereas genome sequencing and assembly technologies are improving, cost can still be prohibitive for plant species with large, complex genomes. As a consequence, genomics work on some taxa in evolutionarily pivotal positions in the vascular plant tree of life has been hampered. The species-rich genu...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Karbstein, Kevin, Choudhary, Nancy, Xie, Ting, Tomasello, Salvatore, Wagner, Natascha D., Barke, Birthe H., Paetzold, Claudia, Bradican, John P., Preick, Michaela, Himmelbach, Axel, Stein, Nils, Papantonis, Argyris, Irisarri, Iker, de Vries, Jan, Pucker, Boas, Hörandl, Elvira
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:digitalcsic_::87d372270d530cfb1861ef317888b4c8
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/428111
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:De novo assembly strategies
Gene evolution
Illumina vs. Nanopore vs. PacBio sequencing
Large non-model plant genomes
Mitogenome
Nuclear genome
Plastome
Ranunculaceae
Ranunculus auricomus species complex
Descripción
Sumario:Whereas genome sequencing and assembly technologies are improving, cost can still be prohibitive for plant species with large, complex genomes. As a consequence, genomics work on some taxa in evolutionarily pivotal positions in the vascular plant tree of life has been hampered. The species-rich genus Ranunculus (Ranunculaceae) is an important angiosperm group for the study of polyploidy, apomixis, and reticulate evolution. However, neither mitochondrial nor high-quality nuclear genome sequences are available. This limits phylogenomic, functional, and taxonomic analyses thus far. Here, we tested Illumina short-read, Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) and PacBio (HiFi) long-read, and hybrid-read assembly strategies. We sequenced the diploid progenitor species R. cassubicifolius (R. auricomus species complex) and selected the best assemblies in terms of completeness, contiguity, and quality scores. We first assembled the plastome (156 kbp, 85 genes) and mitogenome (1.18 Mbp, 40 genes) sequences using Illumina and Illumina-PacBio-hybrid strategies, respectively. We also present an updated plastome and the first mitogenome phylogeny of Ranunculaceae, including studies of gene loss (e.g., infA, ycf15, or rps) with evolutionary implications. For the nuclear genome sequence, we favored a PacBio-based assembly polished three times with filtered short reads and subsequently scaffolded into eight pseudochromosomes by chromatin conformation data (Hi-C). We obtained a haploid genome sequence of 2.69 Gbp, with 94.1% complete BUSCO genes found and 35 482 annotated genes, and inferred ancient gene duplications compared to existing Ranunculales genomes. The genomic information presented here will enable advanced evolutionary-functional analyses for the species complex, but also for the genus and beyond Ranunculaceae.