Neem Genome Assembly

Abstract

Genome assembly refers to the process of taking a large number of short DNA sequences and putting them back together to create a representation of the original chromosomes from which the DNA originated. For assembling neem genome, we filtered the NGS raw reads from Illumina to get high-quality reads followed by assembly using Velvet assembler. Similar process was also followed to assemble Roche/454 reads using MIRA. The individual assembly from velvet and MIRA was merged using cd-hit to get the final assembly of neem genome. Transcriptome of neem was assembled from short-read data from different tissues using Trinity assembler. The reads for chloroplast and mitochondria were extracted separately by mapping genome reads to chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes of known plants. The reads were assembled separately using Velvet.