NRGene and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center assemble a second maize reference genome

Dr. Tom Brutnell, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, in cooperation with a global team of researchers, and NRGene, the leading genomic big data company, announce the accurate assembly of the W22 maize reference genome.

“We’re excited to share the data with the research community to enhance our knowledge of maize beyond what the current B73 line allows us,” said Dr. Brutnell, Director of the Enterprise Institute for Renewable Fuels. “Instead of spending our time assembling genomes, we can now devote our time to analysis.”

With DeNovoMAGICTM3.0 software, the second version of W22 has reached a scaffold N50 of 35.5 MB with less than 2% unfilled sequence gaps.

DeNovoMAGIC assembles Illumina reads into long-phased sequences to deliver accurate assemblies from even the most complex genomes. No matter the size, ploidy or zygosity, the results accelerate downstream analysis and reduce technical work.

By building an independent genome map of W22 using next-generation mapping (NGM) with BioNano’s Irys® system, Dr. Kelly Dawe of the University of Georgia provided the independent assessment of this version.

The Irys optical mapping system uses high-resolution, single-molecule imaging of labeled, long DNA to produce a long-range map of the genome, which can be used to correct or enhance a genome sequence assembly.

“99.4% of the scaffolds were collinear with our BioNano genome map, indicating that NRGene’s DeNovoMAGIC3.0 has generated a very high quality reference assembly,” said Dr. Dawe. By combining the BioNano data with NRGene’s assembly, Dr. Dawe was also able to improve the N50 scaffold size to 75 MB.

“We are pleased to see next-generation mapping used to improve the maize reference genome,” commented Dr. Erik Holmlin, CEO of BioNano. “This work supports what we have seen in other settings: combining next-generation mapping from BioNano with sequencing technologies provides significantly better results.”

“True scientific breakthroughs only occur with significant collaboration,” says Gil Ronen, CEO of NRGene. “We’re pleased that our technology has once again been selected to be a critical part of the process by such a stellar group of researchers.”