Applications of Optical Mapping for Plant Genome Assembly and Structural Variation Detection

Optical mapping plays an important role in plant genomics, particularly in plant genome assembly and large-scale structural variation detection. While DNA sequencing provides base-by-base nucleotide information, optical mapping shows the physical locations of selected enzyme restriction sites in a genome. The long single-molecule maps produced by optical mapping make it a useful auxiliary technique to DNA sequencing, which generally cannot span large and complex genomic regions. Although optical mapping, therefore, offers unique advantages to researchers, there are few dedicated tools to assist in optical mapping analyses. In this chapter, we present runBNG2, a successor of runBNG to help optical-mapping data analysis for diverse datasets.