Puccinia kuehnii genome

Puccinia kuehnii, the causal agent of orange rust, is a fungal pathogen that has caused significant yield losses to sugarcane crops in Florida since 2007. Identification of virulence factors is an essential step to understand host-pathogen interactions and to develop new methods of disease management. Therefore, we have sequenced the genomes of isolates P. kuehnii 1040 and 2143 that were collected, respectively, from sugarcane cultivars CL85-1040 and CP89-2143, to perform future comparative genomics among Puccinia species and identify fungal pathogenicity factors.Short read Illumina and long read Pacbio sequencing were used to generate hybrid genome assemblies of 73.9 Mb and 113 Mb, for the two orange rust isolates 1040 and 2143, respectively. Gene predictions were obtained from assembled genomes using MAKER and were further validated with transcript evidence by RNAseq data.