A de novo Eruca sativa reference genome assembly and annotation. Eruca reference genome

Eruca sativa (syn. Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa) is a leafy vegetable of the Brassicaceae family. It is native to the Mediterranean basin but has become naturalised on every inhabited continent. It is grown as a popular leafy vegetable which has distinctive hot and peppery flavours. This study sequenced and annotated the genome of an elite uniform inbred line developed by Elsoms Seeds Ltd. (Spalding, UK) as part of a BBSRC funded iCASE award (BB/J012629/1) and LINK project (BB/N01894X/1) at the University of Reading, UK. De novo sequencing and assembly was performed by the Earlham Institute (Norwich, UK) using combined PCR free paired-end (PE) and long mate pair (LMP) sequencing on Illumina HiSeq2500 and MiSeq platforms. Genome annotation was performed by Novogene Co. Ltd. (Hong Kong) by using a homology-based method comparing Eruca genome sequences with Arabidopsis thaliana, Arabidopsis lyrata, Brassica napus, Boechera stricta, Capsella rubella, and Raphanus sativus. Ab initio statistical models were also used to predict genes and their intron-exon structures. Consensus predictions were updated by adding UTR annotations and models for alternative splicing isoforms. Predicted proteins were functionally annotated using alignments to SwissProt, TrEMBL, KEGG, and InterPro.