Whole genome sequencing of niger, Guizotia abyssinica Cass

Niger, Guizotia abyssinica L.f Cass., belonging to the family Compositae, subtribe Coreopsidinae is a diploid annual oilseed crop with 30 chromosomes and reported genome size of 3.5 MB. The crop has its origin in Ethiopia and is cultivated in Asian Countries like India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, and parts of China. In addition to the seed oil, various parts of the plant have several ethnomedicinal uses and valued for their nutritional properties. The crop is quite hardy, grows on marginal lands and hilly tops and slopes and is less vulnerable to biotic and abiotic stresses as compared to other major annual oilseed crops. Varietal and hybrid development and trait improvement programmes are constrained by the strong self incompatibility and lack of genomic resources. Since conventional sequencing of highly heterozygous genomes can lead to fragmented assemblies, redundant contigs representing allelic variation and difficulty in anchoring scaffolds to chromosomes, we have developed a homozygous doubled haploid DH line of niger cv. JNS-9 to make the chromosome level genome assembly more accurate and contiguous.