Rounding up the annual ryegrass genome: High-quality reference genome of Lolium rigidum

Abstract

The genome of the major agricultural weed species, annual ryegrass (Lolium rigidum) was assembled, annotated and analysed. Annual ryegrass is a major weed in grain cropping, and has the remarkable capacity to evolve resistance to herbicides with various modes of action. The chromosome-level assembly was achieved using short- and long-read sequencing in combination with Hi-C mapping. The assembly size is 2.44 Gb with N50 = 361.79 Mb across 1,764 scaffolds where the seven longest sequences correspond to the seven chromosomes. Genome completeness assessed through BUSCO returned a 99.8% score for complete (unique and duplicated) and fragmented genes using the Viridiplantae set. We found evidence..