Gapless assembly of maize chromosomes using long read technologies

Creating gapless telomere-to-telomere assemblies of complex genomes is one of the ultimate challenges in genomics.

We used long read technologies and an optical map based approach to produce a maize genome assembly composed of only 63 contigs.

The B73-Ab10 genome includes gapless assemblies of chromosome 3 (236 Mb) and chromosome 9 (162 Mb), multiple highly repetitive centromeres and heterochromatic knobs, and 53 Mb of the Ab10 meiotic drive haplotype.