PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Caroline Belser
AU  - Franc-Christophe Baurens
AU  - Benjamin Noel
AU  - Guillaume Martin
AU  - Corinne Cruaud
AU  - Benjamin Istace
AU  - Nabila Yahiaoui
AU  - Karine Labadie
AU  - Eva Hřibová
AU  - Jaroslav Doležel
AU  - Arnaud Lemainque
AU  - Patrick Wincker
AU  - Angélique D’Hont
AU  - Jean-Marc Aury
TI  - Telomere-to-telomere gapless chromosomes of banana using nanopore sequencing
AID  - 10.1101/2021.04.16.440017
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.04.16.440017
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/17/2021.04.16.440017.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/17/2021.04.16.440017.full
AB  - Long-read technologies hold the promise to obtain more complete genome assemblies and to make them easier. Coupled with long-range technologies, they can reveal the architecture of complex regions, like centromeres or rDNA clusters. These technologies also make it possible to know the complete organization of chromosomes, which remained complicated before even when using genetic maps. However, generating a gapless and telomere-to-telomere assembly is still not trivial, and requires a combination of several technologies and the choice of suitable software. Here, we report a chromosome-scale assembly of a banana genome (Musa acuminata) generated using Oxford Nanopore long-reads. We generated a genome coverage of 177X from a single PromethION flowcell with near 17X with reads longer than 75Kb. From the 11 chromosomes, 5 were entirely reconstructed in a single contig from telomere to telomere, revealing for the first time the content of complex regions like centromeres or clusters of paralogous genes.Competing Interest StatementJean-Marc Aury received travel and accommodation expenses to speak at Oxford Nanopore Technologies conferences. Jean-Marc Aury and Caroline Belser received accommodation expenses to speak during Bionano Genomics user meetings. The authors declare that they have no other competing interests.