Aim & Strategy

The key to de novo (without reference genome) sequence-assemble large and complex genomes, like the garlic one (which was not possible before), is to use a hybrid approach. That may include high-throughput sequencing of Illumina <https://www.illumina.com>, long reads with high accuracy of Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) <https://www.pacb.com> and extra-long reads of Oxford Nanopore Technologies <https://nanoporetech.com>, together with DNA optical mapping of Bionano Genomics <https://bionanogenomics.com>. Therefore, it is possible to exploit the high throughput, coverage and accuracy of several complementary sequencing platforms with high consensus accuracy, free of systematic errors, achieving Quality Values (QV) >50 (>99.999% accurate), together with long-reads of others, as well as optical mapping. Besides, –and most importantly– newly developed and specific tailor-made assembly bioinformatics workflow pipelines for this particular scenario, requiring special algorithms and high computational power for large and complex genomes like the garlic one. And most importantly, such whole genome sequencing-assembly can be further improved using flow-cytometry chromosome sorting,