Whole-genome sequencing of 13 Arctic plants and draft genomes of Oxyria digyna and Cochlearia groenlandica

Abstract

To understand the genomic characteristics of Arctic plants, we generated 28-44 Gb of short-read sequencing data from 13 Arctic plants collected from the High Arctic Svalbard. We successfully estimated the genome sizes of eight species by using the k-mer-based method (180-894 Mb). Among these plants, the mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna) and Greenland scurvy grass (Cochlearia groenlandica) had relatively small genome sizes and chromosome numbers. We obtained 45 x and 121 x high-fidelity long-read sequencing data. We assembled their reads into high-quality draft genomes (genome size: 561 and 250 Mb; contig N50 length: 36.9 and 14.8 Mb, respectively), and correspondingly annotated 43,105 and 29,675 genes using similar to 46 and similar to 85 million RNA sequencing reads. We identified 765,012 and 88,959 single-nucleotide variants, and 18,082 and 7,698 structural variants (variant size >= 50 bp). This study provided high-quality genome assemblies of O. digyna and C. groenlandica, which are valuable resources for the population and molecular genetic studies of these plants.