Genome sequence and assembly of the twenty-five founder lines of the the Nested Association Mapping (NAM) population.

Maize is an important crop and model organism for plant genetics. However, currently nearly all forms of sequence analysis are referenced to the single B73 inbred. Beyond B73, the most extensively researched maize lines are the core set of 25 inbreds known as the NAM founder lines, which represent a broad cross-section of modern maize diversity. Prior data show that gene content can differ by more than 5% across lines and that as much as half of the functional genetic information lies outside of genes in highly variable intergenic spaces. To capture and utilize this variation, the NAM founder inbreds have been sequenced and assembled by the NAM Sequencing Consortium using PacBio and BioNano technology, and the resulting scaffolds ordered and oriented using linkage data.