A Genome Resource for Ciborinia camelliae, the Causal Agent of Camellia Flower Blight

Abstract

Ciborinia camelliae Kohn is a camellia pathogen belonging to family Sclerotiniaceae, infecting only flowers of camellias. To better understand the virulence mechanism in this species, the draft genome sequence of the Italian strain of C. camelliae was obtained with a hybrid approach, combining Illumina HiSeq paired reads and MinIon Nanopore long-read sequencing. This combination improved significantly the existing National Center for Biotechnology Information reference genome. The assembly contiguity was implemented decreasing the contig number from 2,604 to 49. The N50 contig size increased from 31,803 to 2,726,972 bp and the completeness of assembly increased from 94.5 to 97.3% according to BUSCO analysis. This work is foundational to allow functional analysis of the infection process in this scarcely known floral pathogen. [Graphic: see text] Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.

Keywords

• camellia pathogen
• long and short reads
• plant-fungal interaction
• Sclerotiniaceae