Whole Genome Assembly and Annotation of R498

A high quality reference genome would enable discovery of genome structure and genetic variation. Here we report an integrative method to generate a 390.3-megabase assembly covering over 99% of the indica rice genome Shuhui498 with 7 of the 12 chromosomes complete and the rest 5 each containing only one gap in its centromeric region.

We predicted 38,714 high confidence protein coding genes in R498 through an evidence-based gene prediction pipeline by combining known proteins, experimentally cloned cDNAs/ESTs and assembled transcripts from rice RNA-seq data.