Populus nigra cultivar:Blanc de Garonne Genome sequencing. Populus nigra cultivar:Blanc de Garonne

Black poplar is a dominant and emblematic species of the European riparian forest. Nonetheless, Populus nigra is one of the most endangered tree species in Europe due to human activities on its habitat. European conservation programmes have been conducted for 25 years, with different in situ or ex situ objectives, such as clonal mix varieties registered in order to reintroduce the species and its diversity along riverbanks. Moreover, given the good adaptive capabilities, the species is an important contributor as parental pool in interspecific breeding programs in order to create new hybrid cultivars of high performance.In this context, significant progress has been made in developing and applying genetic markers including genetic maps construction, SNP detection for genetic diversity studies, QTL detection and association genetic for biotic traits and wood quality.We report here the genome assembly of Populus nigra cv BDG (Blanc de Garonne), obtained with NRGene facilities. Genetic maps of P. nigra were used to check the first assembly and build the 19 pseudomolecules. The assembly includes 365 Mb of anchored scaffolds and 11.2 Mb of unassembled scaffolds (4.4Mb >50kb). Back mapping of trimmed DNA short reads, RNAseq and Busco analysis revealed a high degree of completeness. Automatic structural annotation was performed with Eugene, as well as an expert annotation of NBS-LRR domain. First comparative genomic studies within Populus genus have already started.The availability of one genome sequence of P. nigra will not only boost comparative genomics within the genus Populus and Salicaceae species but also will accelerate the development of tools to develop new approach such as genomic selection. Optical maps are ongoing to improve the scaffolding.