Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) is an important grain legume of the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia and East Africa. More than eighty five percent of the world pigeonpea is produced and consumed in India where it is a key crop for food and nutritional security of the people. Here we present the first draft of the genome sequence of a popular pigeonpea variety ‘Asha’. The genome was assembled using long sequence reads of 454 GS-FLX sequencing chemistry with mean read lengths of >550 bp and >10-fold genome coverage, resulting in 510,809,477 bp of high quality sequence. Total 47,004 protein coding genes and 12,511 transposable elements related genes were predicted. We identified 1,213 disease resistance/defense response genes and 152 abiotic stress tolerance genes in the pigeonpea genome that make it a hardy crop. In comparison to soybean, pigeonpea has relatively fewer number of genes for lipid biosynthesis and larger number of genes for cellulose synthesis. The sequence contigs were arranged in to 59,681 scaffolds, which were anchored to eleven chromosomes of pigeonpea with 347 genic-SNP markers of an intra-species reference genetic map. Eleven pigeonpea chromosomes showed low but significant synteny with the twenty chromosomes of soybean. The genome sequence was used to identify large number of hypervariable ‘Arhar’ simple sequence repeat (HASSR) markers, 437 of which were experimentally validated for PCR amplification and high rate of polymorphism among pigeonpea varieties. These markers will be useful for fingerprinting and diversity analysis of pigeonpea germplasm and molecular breeding applications. This is the first plant genome sequence completed entirely through a network of Indian institutions led by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and provides a valuable resource for the pigeonpea variety improvement.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13562-011-0088-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Leaf rust is one of the most important diseases of wheat and is caused by Puccinia triticina, a highly variable rust pathogen prevalent worldwide. Decoding the genome of this pathogen will help in unraveling the molecular basis of its evolution and in the identification of genes responsible for its various biological functions. We generated high quality draft genome sequences (approximately 100- 106 Mb) of two races of P. triticina; the variable and virulent Race77 and the old, avirulent Race106. The genomes of races 77 and 106 had 33X and 27X coverage, respectively. We predicted 27678 and 26384 genes, with average lengths of 1,129 and 1,086 bases in races 77 and 106, respectively and found that the genomes consisted of 37.49% and 39.99% repetitive sequences. Genome wide comparative analysis revealed that Race77 differs substantially from Race106 with regard to segmental duplication (SD), repeat element, and SNP/InDel characteristics. Comparative analyses showed that Race 77 is a recent, highly variable and adapted Race compared with Race106. Further sequence analyses of 13 additional pathotypes of Race77 clearly differentiated the recent, active and virulent, from the older pathotypes. Average densities of 2.4 SNPs and 0.32 InDels per kb were obtained for all P. triticina pathotypes. Secretome analysis demonstrated that Race77 has more virulence factors than Race 106, which may be responsible for the greater degree of adaptation of this pathogen. We also found that genes under greater selection pressure were conserved in the genomes of both races, and may affect functions crucial for the higher levels of virulence factors in Race77. This study provides insights into the genome structure, genome organization, molecular basis of variation, and pathogenicity of P. triticina. The genome sequence data generated in this study have been submitted to public domain databases and will be an important resource for comparative genomics studies of the more than 4000 existing Puccinia species.

Stripe rust of wheat, caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici, is one of the important diseases of wheat. We used NGS technologies to generate a draft genome sequence of two highly virulent (46S 119 and 31) and a least virulent (K) pathotypes of P. striiformis from the Indian subcontinent. We generated ~24,000–32,000 sequence contigs (N50;7.4–9.2 kb), which accounted for ~86X–105X sequence depth coverage with an estimated genome size of these pathotypes ranging from 66.2–70.2 Mb. A genome-wide analysis revealed that pathotype 46S 119 might be highly evolved among the three pathotypes in terms of year of detection and prevalence. SNP analysis revealed that ~47% of the gene sets are affected by nonsynonymous mutations. The extracellular secreted (ES) proteins presumably are well conserved among the three pathotypes, and perhaps purifying selection has an important role in differentiating pathotype 46S 119 from pathotypes K and 31. In the present study, we decoded the genomes of three pathotypes, with 81% of the total annotated genes being successfully assigned functional roles. Besides the identification of secretory genes, genes essential for pathogen-host interactions shall prove this study as a huge genomic resource for the management of this disease using host resistance.

Oryza coarctata (KKLL; 2n = 4x = 48, 665 Mb) also known as Porteresia coarctata is an extreme halophyte species of genus Oryza. Using Illumina and Nanopore reads, we achieved the assembled genome size of 569.9 Mb, accounting 85.69% of the estimated genome size with N50 of 1.85 Mb and 19.89% repetitive region. We also found 230,968 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and 5,512 non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). The functional annotation of predicted 33,627 protein-coding genes and 4,916 transcription factors revealed that high salinity adaptation of this species is due to the exclusive or excessive presence of stress-specific genes as compared to rice. We have identified 8 homologs to salt-tolerant SOS1 genes, one of the three main components of salt overly sensitive (SOS) signal pathway. On the other hand, the phylogenetic analysis of the assembled chloroplast (134.75 kb) and mitochondrial genome (491.06 kb) favours the conservative nature of these organelle genomes within Oryza taxon.