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Haplotype-resolved sweet potato genome traces back its hexaploidization history

Abstract

Here we present the 15 pseudochromosomes of sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, the seventh most important crop in the world and the fourth most significant in China. By using a novel haplotyping method based on genome assembly, we have produced a half haplotype-resolved genome from ~296 Gb of paired-end sequence reads amounting to roughly 67-fold coverage. By phylogenetic tree analysis of homologous chromosomes, it was possible to estimate the time of two recent whole-genome duplication events as occurring about 0.8 and 0.5 million years ago. This half haplotype-resolved hexaploid genome represents the first successful attempt to investigate the complexity of chromosome sequence composition directly in a polyploid genome, using sequencing of the polyploid organism itself rather than any of its simplified proxy relatives. Adaptation and application of our approach should provide higher resolution in future genomic structure investigations, especially for similarly complex genomes.

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Fig. 1: Outline of current sweet potato genome assembly.
Fig. 2: Summary of variations.
Fig. 3: Illustration of seed-finding algorithm.
Fig. 4: Identified gene clusters in present I. batatas genome.
Fig. 5: Evolutionary history of cultivated I. batatas revealed by phylogenetic analysis of homologous chromosome regions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Dai and Z. Nikoloski for helpful discussions during the haplotyping. We thank J. Zhu and Y. Jiang from Purdue University, J. Yu from Iowa State University and G. Gheysen from Ghent University for their invaluable comments during proofreading. J. Yang acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler). M-Hossein Moeinzadeh acknowledges support from IMPRS-CBSC doctoral programme. This project was funded by the International Science & Technology Cooperation Program of China (2015DFG32370), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31201254, 31361140366, 31501353), the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2011AA100607-4, 2012AA101204-3), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2012KIP518), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2012M520945), the Shanghai Municipal Afforestation & City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation Administration (G102410, F122422, F132427, G142434, G152429) and the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (14DZ2260400, 14ZR1414100).

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

J.Y., M-H.M., H.K., A.R.F., B.T., P.Z. and M.V. planned and coordinated the project and wrote the manuscript. G.-L.L., J.-L.Z. and Z.S. supplied the newly bred cultivar, Taizhong6. W.-J. F., G.-F.D. H.-X.W. and S.-S.Z. prepared genomic DNA. H.K. conducted the primary genome assembly and repeat sequence identification. J.Y. and M-H.M. conducted haplotyping and genome evolution analysis. S.B. managed part of sequencing work. J.H., P.X., S.H. and F.-H.H. supported and inspired a part of the analysis.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Peng Zhang or Martin Vingron.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–9, Supplementary Note.

Supplementary Table 1

Statistics of QC-passed reads and mapped sequence data obtained from all libraries.

Supplementary Table 2

Putative gene clusters list, yellow background indicates eight gene clusters shown in Fig. 4.

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Yang, J., Moeinzadeh, MH., Kuhl, H. et al. Haplotype-resolved sweet potato genome traces back its hexaploidization history. Nature Plants 3, 696–703 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-017-0002-z

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