Draft Genome Assembly
A chromosome-scale genomic assembly of an F1 Silphium integrifolium x S. perfoliatum is being prepared at the time of writing. The S. integrifolium mother was a leaf blotch resistant, large-headed selection from a breeding population that had undergone approximately 6 cycles of recurrent selection for increased number of fertile ray florets (“feminization”) per head and disease resistance. The founders of the breeding population were sourced from wild central Kansas populations, i.e., located within the geographic region we call “West” in this study. Flash-frozen tissue was sent to Arizona Genomics Institute for high-molecular-weight DNA extraction, which was then prepared for PacBio Sequel-II CCS sequencing at the Genome Sequencing Center at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The libraries were sequenced at roughly 21.5X depth assuming a 10 Gb genome size. Reads were assembled de novo using hifiasm assembler (Cheng et al., 2021) using default parameters.