Assembly of the Durum Wheat (cv. Svevo) genome

Durum wheat with a total production of about 35 million tons is the 10th most important crops worldwide. It is an integral component of the Mediterranean diet and one of the historical foods that followed the birth of civilization, likely to be one of the first domesticated crops in the Fertile Crescent. Durum is a tetraploid wheat with a genome of about 12 Gb, domesticated from wild emmer in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago. Further, it is an integral component of the Mediterranean diet and it is the historical food that followed the birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent. From here it expanded to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and it is today cultivated across the globe. The domestication process and the subsequent breeding activity have selected the modern durum wheat fixing the typical domestication traits (e.g. brittle rachis, naked seeds and threshability), agronomic traits (e.g. short straw and disease resistances) as well as specific pasta quality traits (grain hardness, pigment content, protein content).An international consortium has generated a high quality reference sequence of the modern durum wheat cultivar Svevo. Whole genome libraries were sequenced at University of Salerno and Genomix4life (Salerno, Italy) with Illumina short paired-end (2 x 250 bp) and long mate pair (up to 8-10 kb) protocols and the reads were assembled with the NR-Gene DeNovoMAGICTM pipeline. In total, a 270x coverage was obtained, and the reads were assembled into 10.5 Gb of sequence with an L50 and L90 length of 6 and 1 Mb, respectively (N50: 493; N90: 2019). The assembly scaffolds have been anchored to a high-density genetic map based on Svevo × Zavitan RIL population and merged into super-scaffolds using Hi-C data; 95% of the scaffolds have been anchored along the chromosomes and 90% oriented. Sequencing process has been partially funded by the InterOmics project that also hosts (https://www.interomics.eu/durum-wheat-genome) some services used by the international consortium to study the genome. RNAseq and miRNA data are accessible at NCBI (SRA accession: SRP149116).