A chromosome-level genome assembly of Verticillium albo-atrum, an dangerous quarantine pathogen known for causing...

Verticillium albo-atrum is one of the most dangerous quarantine pathogen, which is a soil-borne pathogen known for causing verticillium wilt, a disease that affects a wide range of plants, including many economically important crops. However, the lack of high-quality genome resource has greatly limited the research of molecular and evolutionary mechanisms of Verticillium albo-atrum. The highly-quality genome of Verticillium albo-atrum provides a valuable resource for better understanding of the biological characteristics.

We sequenced and assembled the genome of Verticillium albo-atrum using ONT long reads combined with DNBSEQ-T7 paired-end short reads and anchored 11 contigs into 8 chromosomes using Hi-C chromatin contact information, yielding a 35.95 Mb chromosome-level genome assembly with a N50 of 4.20 Mb. In addition, transcript-based annotation identified 9967 protein-coding genes, of which 84.17% were functionally annotated. BUSCO analysis demonstrated that this genome assembly has a high-level completeness of 96.47% gene coverage.