COURTESY OF RON BILLINGS
Species: Loblolly pine, Pinus taeda
Genome size: 22.18 billion base pairs
Members of the Loblolly Pine Genome Project have sequenced the largest genome ever assembled—all 22.18 billion base pairs of their chosen conifer, Pinus taeda. Their work, both describing the loblolly pine genome and the methods they devised to decode it, was published today (March 20) in Genome Biology and Genetics. Norway spruce (Picea abies), the previous record-holder for largest genome sequenced and assembled, has only 19.6 billion base pairs.
The University of California, Davis’s Charles Langley and colleagues used whole-genome shotgun sequencing on a sample derived from a single megagametophyte, the haploid tissue of a pine seed, augmented with several long-fragment mate-pair libraries from the parental diploid DNA. To make the formidable assembly task ...
