Plant Genome Research

Progress in plant genome research is vital to understanding natural evolution and feeding the world. The size and highly repetitive nature of plant genomes make building quality reference genomes a challenge for short-read sequencing technologies. Bionano Saphyr™ offers hybrid scaffolding and structural variation discovery capabilities that are essential for driving progress.

Short-read technologies typically fail to span long repeat regions or disambiguate different copies of interspersed repeats, resulting in limited contig length, introduction of chimeric joins and other assembly errors. Unlike next-generation sequencing (NGS), which algorithmically infers structural variations from fragmented DNA data, Bionano optical genome mapping directly observes long DNA molecules by linearizing and imaging DNA in its native state using massively parallel NanoChannels.

De novo Saphyr genome maps can be integrated with sequence assembly to order and orient sequence fragments, identify and correct potential chimeric joins in the sequence assembly, and estimate the gap size between adjacent sequences.

Bionano hybrid scaffolding considerably reduces the number of contigs found in the initial NGS assembly and improves contiguity up to 1000 times over NGS-based approaches alone.

The combination of Bionano maps with sequencing data improves assembly accuracy and quality while reducing the need for deep sequencing coverage. This improved contiguity significantly lowers costs associated with assembling reference genomes.

Saphyr also offers unparalleled sensitivity for large structural variations from 500 bp to megabase pair lengths.

• 99% sensitivity for homozygous insertions/deletions larger than 500 base pairs
• 95% sensitivity for heterozygous insertions/deletions larger than 500 base pairs
• 95% sensitivity for balanced and unbalanced translocations larger than 50,000 base pairs
• 99% sensitivity for inversions larger than 30,000 base pairs
• 97% sensitivity for duplications larger than 30,000 base pairs

Saphyr detects all types of structural variants down to 5% Variant Allele Fraction. Saphyr provides this performance typically with a false positive rate of less than 2%. Saphyr also detects repeats, copy number variants, and complex rearrangements.

See below for publications, white papers and other resources regarding Bionano genome mapping in plant genome research.