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Abstract

Arabidopsis thaliana was the first plant, and the third multicellular organism after Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster to have a reference strain completely sequenced. In order to leverage the extensive genomic information available for A. thaliana, including an increasing amount of knowledge of within-species diversity, as well as to better understand plant genome evolution in general, we produced a reference genome sequence of Arabidopsis lyrata, the closest well-characterized relative in the same genus as A. thaliana, which diverged about 5 million years ago. The genomes was ~8-fold shotgun sequenced. Comparing the genomes of A. thaliana and A. lyrata provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand key aspects of plant genome evolution in species that share high enough sequence identity that intermediate genomic changes can be directly determined. In detail, besides the comparison of the general issues, including large-scale chromosome, gene content, orthologs, gene family, repeat, we paid more attention to four aspects: elucidation of genome size variation in the two closely related plant species for the first time; genome-wide analysis of microstructural evolution; therelationship between breeding stem and genome size evolvement; SNP density comparison among different chromosomes and different populations within A. lyrata. We will report on our analyses, focusing on genome size variation between the two species in various aspects.