SEQUON - Sequencing the Onion Genome

Abstract

Background Onion (Allium cepa L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops worldwide. In terms of global production value, onion ranks second after tomato. In terms of genetics and genomics, knowledge of the onion genome is scare compare to other crop plants (e.g. tomato). This is partly due to the huge size of the onion genome (16GB). Our initial assembly contains 10.6 Gb, witch is a greater proportion of the genome than we expected from our initial hypothesis, suggesting that the onion genome contains a large number of ancient repeats, which are diverged enough to be assembled. Based on our results, and the corresponding insight, we hypothesize that long read sequencing (e.g. Oxford Nanopore or PacBio) will greatly improve the assembly. Objectives