The draft genome sequence of an upland wild rice species, Oryza granulata

Abstract

Exploiting novel gene sources from wild relatives has proven to be an efficient approach to advance crop genetic breeding efforts. Oryza granulata, with the GG genome type, occupies the basal position of the Oryza phylogeny and has the second largest genome (~882 Mb). As an upland wild rice species, it possesses renowned traits that distinguish it from other Oryza species, such as tolerance to shade and drought, immunity to bacterial blight and resistance to the brown planthopper. Here, we generated a 736.66-Mb genome assembly of O. granulata with 40,131 predicted protein-coding genes. With Hi-C data, for the first time, we anchored ~98.2% of the genome assembly to the twelve pseudo-chromosomes. This chromosome-length genome assembly of O. granulata will provide novel insights into rice genome evolution, enhance our efforts to search for new genes for future rice breeding programmes and facilitate the conservation of germplasm of this endangered wild rice species.