Improvement of the Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei reference assembly

The reference genome of the Blumeria graminis f. sp. hordei DH14 (Bgh) has been proven an extremely useful resource and has supported a number of studies in plant pathology and fungal genomics. Despite its high fragmentation (15056 contigs, 6843 scaffolds) the genome presents high completeness (94% Complete Single-Copy BUSCO), while the 6470 available gene models have been manually curated and provide a valuable dataset for further studies. Nevertheless, recent work on the Bgh genome has shown that there are genes missed during the initial annotation and therefore revisiting this process with up to date tools might reveal more unidentified genes or important genomic features. To this end we collaborated with PhytopathDB (http://www.phytopathdb.org) in order to facilitate a second round of manual annotation. In addition, we improved the assembly by utilising the PacBio long-read sequencing platform.