Sweet potato genome revealing its secrets

The sweet potato is an essential source of vitamins, minerals and energy in many communities around the world.

Research sponsored by the Trilateral Research Association of Sweet Potato aims to create a sweet potato pan-genome, which will allow researchers to see unique and shared traits among all varieties and be able to breed sweet potatoes with higher nutritional values, productivity, disease resistance, etc. With the genome and ultimately the pan-genome analysis, breeders will be able to develop more nutritious, high-yielding varieties with fewer resource requirements.

NRGene has just delivered a significantly improved assembly of the sweet potato genome to a group of scientists from Japan, China and Korea.

The assembly of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) genome took less than two months using Illumina technology and NRGene’s DeNovoMAGICTM 3.0, which leverages the power of big data to analyse Illumina reads quickly and efficiently, delivering complete genomes at high levels of accuracy.

The sweet potato is a heterozygote, hexaploid species with 90 chromosomes (2n=6X=90) and a large genome size of 4.8–5.3 pg/2C nucleus. NRGene’s complete genome assembly using DeNovoMAGICTM 3.0 provided a size of 2.37 Gbp and scaffolds N50 of 2.15 Mbp. Busco analysis of the gene’s content has demonstrated the completeness and accuracy of the assembly, with more than 94.5% of the gene sequences complete and located on the assembled genome.