The Oryza australiensis genome reveals potential as a source of genes for rice improvement.

ABSTRACT: The wild relatives of cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) represent largely untapped sources of novel genetic material for crop improvement. Here, we present a chromosome-level, haplotype-resolved genome for O. australiensis, an Australian wild rice relative, assembled de novo using PacBio HiFi long reads (80 × coverage). The final assembly had a 99.3% BUSCO completeness score and a total length of 909 Mb. The assembly was highly contiguous (contig N50 of 72.6 Mb) despite its extremely high repeat element content, which was estimated to comprise 76% of the genome. There were 26,529 transcripts and 23,929 potential genes annotated from the assembly, of which 1,431 were species-specific to O. australiensis and not found in cultivated rice. Annotation of these revealed enrichment for functions

SUBMITTER: Morrison S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12311144 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature