Sequoia sempervirens Genome sequencing and assembly. Sequoia sempervirens

Sequoia sempervirens, commonly known as the ‘coast redwood’, is native to a narrow band of northern California and is iconic for being among the world’s oldest, largest and tallest trees. Less commonly known is that these trees feature sporadic albinism. In most plants, albinism is a lethal trait due to a lack of chlorophyll and photosynthetic potential; however, spontaneous incidents of albinism in natural populations of redwoods afford a rare opportunity to capture these mutants, because they exist in a parasitic and stunted form that arises vegetatively from and grows adjoined to a parent tree. In this work, we isolated chloroplast DNA sequences from coast redwoods, assembled them to obtain the first reported reference sequence of the S. sempervirens chloroplast genome and used this reference to genotype sequences from albino, variegated and green tissues.