There’s usually significant lag between a discovery being made and a paper being published, but the team at DowDuPont didn’t waste any time to get the first DLS paper out! The study, pre-published  in May on Biorxiv and now published in Nature, describes a chromosome-scale de novo assembly of the repeat-rich Sorghum bicolor Tx430 genome built using Oxford Nanopore (ONT) sequence combined with Bionano’s Direct Label and Stain (DLS) optical maps generated on Saphyr.

Sorghum’s 10 chromosomes are represented in a final hybrid assembly consisting of only 29 scaffolds, which in most cases encompass entire chromosome arms. Bionano maps were used extensively to detect and automatically correct assembly-based errors. The final scaffold N50 value is 33.28 Mbp and covers more than 90% of Sorghum’s expected genome length.

This study is another powerful example of the utility of Bionano maps for quickly building reference assemblies and further demonstrates the platform’s flexibility to work with any input sequence data – Bionano makes EVERY sequence assembly better.

Read the paper in Nature, and see more assemblies improved by DLS on the DLS site. We have a webinar from the same team on their use of DLS to assemble maize genomes as well!