Tag: Genomics

Shendure et al. provide a superb review of how DNA sequencing technology has changed over the years and how these changes open up new applications. They start with the Maxam and Gilbert chemical cleavage and the Sanger “chain-termination” methods developed in the 1970s, and describe the scale-ups…

Chromosomes are long, and DNA sequencing reads have typically been short, meaning that it is necessary to assemble lots and lots of short reads by looking for overlapping sequences. This strategy is made more difficult in repeat-rich and transposon-rich regions of genomes, which characterize many plant…

The current version of the Arabidopsis thaliana Col-0 reference genome, TAIR10, still has some gaps and mis-assemblies due to centromeres and repeat-rich regions. In another demonstration of the promise of single-molecule sequencing, Michael, Jupe et al. used a single nanopore flow cell to sequence the…

Olive oil is a staple of the healthy “Mediterranean diet” and contains high levels of the monounsaturated fat oleic acid. Unver, Wu et al. present the genome of the wild olive tree (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) (draft sequences of domesticated olive trees without extensive functional annotation…

Quenopodiium quinoa is a highly nutritive and facultative halophyte pseudocereal whose cultivation has increased 10 fold in the last decades. However, the adaption to non-native areas is not easy to achieve and the limited genetic resources do not allow a breeding program. Zou and collaborators have…

The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha is a fascinating plant for many reasons, including the fact that it is one of the earliest terrestrial species that split off from the rest of the land plants. Therefore, comparisons between Marchantia and green algae or Marchantia and the rest of the land plants tell…

Seeds integrate environmental information and trigger molecular pathways that help with the decision making process of whether to germinate or not. Several studies in numerous species have shown details of global transcriptomic changes during germination. However, Narsai et al. dig a little deeper. By…

A hot topic in plant evolutionary biology is whole genome duplications (WGDs), in which an organism copies its entire genetic dataset. Having double the required DNA is often viewed as detrimental but can be useful in times of rapid environmental change. Recently, the role of WGDs during plant evolution…