The First Flax Genome Assembly

Flax has been used as a crop for millennia, but its molecular resources have developed more slowly than other crop or model systems. However, the advent of next-generation sequencing provided a cost-effective methodology for developing whole genome assemblies from a range of plants. Flax was the first plant genome assembly to show that whole genome shotgun and next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies could be used together, exclusive of any other information, and that this combination alone was sufficient to produce assemblies with high contiguity. The resulting flax genome assembly, which is now the reference genome for this species, consisted of 318 Mbp (in scaffolds), which contained approximately 85% of the actual genome, as measured by flow cytometry. The assembly was validated using independent genomic sequence information including expressed sequence tags, bacterial artificial chromosomes, and fosmids. This reference genome has contributed to the development of many other molecular resources for flax and its wild relatives.