Miaomiao Li, Dongfen Zhang, Qiang Gao, Yingfeng Luo, Hui Zhang, Bin Ma, Chunhai Chen, Annabel Whibley, Yu’e Zhang, Yinghao Cao, Qun Li, Han Guo, Junhui Li, Yanzhai Song, Yue Zhang, Lucy Copsey, Yan Li, Xiuxiu Li, Ming Qi, Jiawei Wang, Yan Chen, Dan Wang, Jinyang Zhao, Guocheng Liu, Bin Wu, Lili Yu, Chunyan Xu, Jiang Li, Shancen Zhao, Yijing Zhang, Songnian Hu, Chengzhi Liang, Ye Yin, Enrico Coen and Yongbiao Xue
Nature Plants
DOI:10.1038/s41477-018-0349-9
Abstract
Snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus L.), a member of the Plantaginaceae family, is an important model for plant genetics andmolecular studies on plant growth and development, transposon biology and self-incompatibility. Here we report a near-complete genome assembly of A. majus cultivar JI7 (A. majus cv.JI7) comprising 510?Megabases (Mb) of genomic sequence and containing 37,714 annotated protein-coding genes. Scaffolds covering 97.12% of the assembled genome were anchored on eight chromosomes. Comparative and evolutionary analyses revealed that a whole-genome duplication event occurred in the Plantaginaceae around 46–49 million years ago (Ma). We also uncovered the genetic architectures associated with complex traits such as flower asymmetry and self-incompatibility, identifying a unique duplication of TCP family genes dated to around 46–49 Ma and reconstructing a near-complete ψS-locus of roughly 2?Mb. The genome sequence obtained in this study not only provides a representative genome sequenced from the Plantaginaceae but also brings the popular plant model system of Antirrhinum into the genomic age.