Theobroma cacao isolate:B | cultivar:Pound 7 Genome sequencing and assembly. Theobroma cacao isolate:B | cultivar:Pound 7

Here we validate the Minion’s application to crop genomics by creating a de novo genome assembly of the heterozygous ‘Pound 7’ clone of cacao (Theobroma cacao), and compare it to the previous two cacao reference genomes. We found that quickly generating a high quality assembly of a heterozygous plant genome was possible for less than $5000, in contrast to previous cacao reference genomes, which required many years and millions of dollars to produce.