A telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of Hongyingzi, a sorghum cultivar used for Chinese Baijiu production
Yanqing Ding, Yilin Wang, Jianxia Xu, Feng Jiang, Wenzhen Li, Qiaoling Zhang, Longping Yang, Zhenyu Zhao, Bin Cheng, Ning Cao, Xu Gao, Xin Zhang, Guihua Zou, Fan Yang, Liyi Zhang
Abstract
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is a world cereal crop used in China for producing Baijiu, a distilled spirit. We report a telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of the Baijiu cultivar Hongyingzi, HYZ-T2T, using ultralong reads. The 10 chromosome pairs contained 33,462 genes, of which 93% were functionally annotated. The 20 telomeres and 10 centromeric regions on the HYZ-T2T chromosomes were predicted and two consecutive large inversions on chromosome 2 were characterized. A 65-gene reconstruction of the metabolic pathway of tannins, the flavor substances in Baijiu, was performed and may advance the breeding of sorghum cultivars for Baijiu production.