Date: Saturday, January 14, 2012
Time: 11:00 AM
Time: 11:00 AM
Room: Pacific Salon 2
Petunia hybrida, the garden petunia, has been used as a model system for decades for evolutionary, developmental and physiological genetics. It is also, at least in the USA, the most popular ornamental plant in overall sales. Nevertheless, Petunia hybrida is essentially an “artificial” species resulting from crossing two progenitor species, the white-flowered, generally self-compatible Petunia axillaris and the red-flowered, self-incompatible Petunia integrifolia. The international consortium of petunia researchers, The Petunia Platform, has initiated a project to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of Petunia integrifolia (subsp. inflata) and Petunia axillaris. Both genomes have been sequenced using Illumina paired-end reads to a depth of 65-70X, with an estimated genome size of 1.2 Gbp. A preliminary assembly of P. inflata has been carried out using SOAPdenovo, with annotation being carried out using MAKER. Assembly of P. axillaris is in progress. We will report our progress on sequence assembly and annotation of the two petunia genomes. Public release of the genome sequences will be through the Sol Genomics Network.