Plant & Animal Genomes XVIII Conference

January 9-13, 2010
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing Of The Oil Palm And Jatropha Genomes

Helge Zieler¹ , Toby Richardson¹ , Ariel Schwartz¹ , Markus Herrgard¹ , David Lomelin¹ , Eric Mathur¹ , Suan Choo Cheah² , Thean Soo Tee² , Weng Wah Lee² , Kia Ling Chua² , Bih Hua Kwan² , Jason Miller³ , Sergey Koren³ , Agnes P. Chan³ , Rama Maiti³ , Paolo Amedeo³ , Steve Ferriera³ , Yu-Hui Rogers³ , Granger Sutton³ , Christopher D. Town³ , J. Craig Venter^1,3

¹  Synthetic Genomics Inc., 11149 North Torrey Pines Road Suite 100, La Jolla CA 92037, USA

²  ACGT Sdn. Bhd., Lot L3-I-1, Enterprise 4, Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil, 57000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

³  J. Craig Venter Institute, 9704 Medical Center Drive, Rockville, MD 20850, USA

Oil palm and jatropha are high-yielding oilseed crops grown in the tropics and sub-tropics, yet little research has been conducted on these promising crops. Oil palm, the highest-yielding oilseed crop in the world, is grown on over 10 million hectares and is a source of approximately one third of the edible oil consumed worldwide. Despite some gains achieved through breeding in the last 6 decades, oil palm yield has not yet reached its genetic potential. Jatropha is a hardy tree that produces high yields of inedible seed oil suitable for biodiesel production. Its wide geographic range, short generation time and availability of diverse germplasm, make jatropha an excellent candidate for rapid development of highly productive lines through breeding and transgenesis. To lay the foundation for improvement of both plant species, we have generated whole-genome shotgun sequences of both genomes (8x sequence of the 1.9 Mb oil palm genome and 10x sequence of the 370 Mb jatropha genome) using primarily Sanger reads to enable high-quality assemblies. The genome sequences have been supplemented with a high volume of EST and transcriptome sequencing and both genomes have been fully annotated. The annotated genomes represent the first comprehensive genomic resources for these two species of oil-producing trees.