Abstract
Oryza glaberrima, which is a distinct species from Asian rice O. sativa, was domesticated in West Africa, and is important for the global food problem. We determined the genome sequence of O. glaberrima IRGC104038 by the whole-genome shotgun methods after gene-enrichment by the methylation filtration method. As a result, 69,083,576 bp (~18%) of the O. sativa (cv. Nipponbare) genome were found to correspond to our sequence reads, while a total of ~12 Mb were unique to O. glaberrima. The sequences could cover (part of) 6,443 genes of O. sativa. Genome-wide comparisons between African and Asian rice revealed lineage-specific amino acid substitutions, splicing variants, etc. In addition, among 2,451 SSRs detected, the lengths of 1,568 were different. The SSR information found in this study will be a useful resource for development of new cultivars. We constructed a database in which the sequences we determined and other related information are available.
