Towards Completion of the Genome that Makes Hot Pepper

Chili pepper (Capsicum annuum) is one of the most important vegetable crop for human being as a rich source of nutritions and spicy condiments. To make reference genome sequence of pepper, we sequenced the whole genome of Capsicum annuum, CM334 using Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer GA2. The genome size of CM334 is estimated as 3.5 Gb. A total of 310 Gb (88.6x coverages of the whole genome) of raw sequences were generated. After filtering out the low quality sequences, a total of 233 Gb (66.7x) of the raw sequences were used for assembly. Total assembled contig length and number were 2.66 Gb and 408,283, respectively. N50 and average length were 22,567 bp and 6,521 bp, respectively. By sequencial scaffolding with mate-pair sequences of 2 kb−5 kb sizes, a total of 2.89 Gb of scaffold which is approximately 83% of the whole genome was assembled. The total number of scaffolds was 84,978. N50 and average length were 168,696bp and 32,181bp, respectively. For annotation of the pepper genome, a total of 46 Gb of transcriptome sequences were generated from 12 different tissues using Illumina GA2 and Hi-seq 2000. We are under way of analyzing the characteristic traits of pepper using transcriptome data. The progress of pepper genome sequencing project including gene annotation, gene family analysis, comparative genomics studies on evolution of hot taste, genome expansion and fruit development will be presented in the meeting.