Shi-Ping Cheng, Kai-Hua Jia, Hui Liu, Ren-Gang Zhang, Zhi-Chao Li, Shan-Shan Zhou, Tian-Le Shi, Ai-Chu Ma, Cong-Wen Yu, Chan Gao, Guang-Lei Cao, Wei Zhao, Shuai Nie, Jing-Fang Guo, Si-Qian Jiao, Xue-Chan Tian, Xue-Mei Yan, Yu-Tao Bao, Quan-Zheng Yun, Xin-Zhu Wang, Ilga Porth, Yousry A. El-Kassaby, Xiao-Ru Wang, Zhen Li, Yves Van de Peer & Jian-Feng Mao
Ginger (Zingiber officinale) is one of the most valued spice plants worldwide; it is prized for its culinary and folk medicinal applications and is therefore of high economic and cultural importance. Here, we present a haplotype-resolved, chromosome-scale assembly for diploid ginger anchored to 11 pseudochromosome pairs with a total length of 3.1 Gb. Remarkable structural variation was identified between haplotypes, and two inversions larger than 15 Mb on chromosome 4 may be associated with ginger infertility. We performed a comprehensive, spatiotemporal, genome-wide analysis of allelic expression patterns, revealing that most alleles are coordinately expressed. The alleles that exhibited the largest differences in expression showed closer proximity to transposable elements, greater coding sequence divergence, more relaxed selection pressure, and more transcription factor binding site differences. We also predicted the transcription factors potentially regulating 6-gingerol biosynthesis. Our allele-aware assembly provides a powerful platform for future functional genomics, molecular breeding, and genome editing in ginger.
This Whole-Genome Shotgun Project data have been deposited in DDBJ/ENA/GenBank under the accession identifier JACMSC000000000. The version described in this paper is version JACMSC010000000. The raw sequence data have been deposited in the Short Read Archive under NCBI BioProject ID PRJNA647255.
Now, for the convenience of use, we store a copy of the genome data here.