Following the assembly and annotation of the first banana nuclear genome (D'Hont et al. 2012), our team has been involved in the production of several other reference sequences.

The first reference sequence produced was for the Pahang HD accession, a doubled haploid of Musa acuminata subspecies malaccensis. This 472.2Mb sequence was obtained by Sanger and 454 sequencing and assembled using information from paired fragments of different sizes including BAC-ends. A second version of this reference sequence was produced with bioinformatics analysis of composite NGS data and completion of a new genetic map (Martin et al. 2016) to obtain 90% anchored sequences and an N50 of 3Mb. More recently, "Long Read" sequencing technologies have made it possible to further improve this reference and to obtain a very high quality assembly of 484Mb of "Telomere-to-Telomere" standard, with 100% anchored sequences and an N50 at 32Mb (Belser et al. 2021) (Long-read Nanopore, PacBio, Optical Cards, Hi-C): Musa balbisiana (2n =2x =22, 430Mb assembled, N50 5. 5 Mb) (Wang et al. 2019), Musa schizocarpa (2n = 2x =22, 519Mb assembled, N50 10 Mb) (Belser et al. 2018). We also collaborated on the analysis of the Ensete glaucum reference sequence (2n = 2x =18, 482Mb assembled, N50 10 Mb (Wang et al. 2022).

• Belser C, Baurens F-C, Noel B, Martin G, Cruaud C, Istace B, Yahiaoui N, Labadie K, Hřibová E, Doležel J, et al. 2021. Telomere-to-telomere gapless chromosomes of banana using nanopore sequencing. Commun. Biol. 4:1047.
• Belser C, Istace B, Denis E, Dubarry M, Baurens F-C, Falentin C, Genete M, Berrabah W, Chèvre A-M, Delourme R, et al. 2018. Chromosome-scale assemblies of plant genomes using nanopore long reads and optical maps. Nat. Plants 4:879. doi: 10.1038/s41477-018-0289-4
• Martin G, Baurens F-C, Droc G, Rouard M, Cenci A, Kilian A, Hastie A, Doležel J, Aury J-M, Alberti A, et al. 2016. Improvement of the banana “Musa acuminata” reference sequence using NGS data and semi-automated bioinformatics methods. BMC Genomics 17:243–255. DOI: 10.1186/s12864-016-2579-4
• Rouard M, Droc G, Martin G, Sardos J, Hueber Y, Guignon V, Cenci A, Geigle B, Hibbins MS, Yahiaoui N, et al. 2018. Three new genome assemblies support a rapid radiation in Musa acuminata (Wild Banana). Genome Biol. Evol. 10:3129–3140. DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evy227
• Wang Z, Miao H, Liu J, Xu B, Yao X, Xu C, Zhao S, Fang X, Jia C, Wang Jingyi, et al. 2019. Musa balbisiana genome reveals subgenome evolution and functional divergence. Nat. Plants 5:810–821.DOI: 10.1038/s41477-019-0452-6
• Wang Z, Rouard M, Biswas MK, Droc G, Cui D, Roux N, Baurens F-C, Ge X-J, Schwarzacher T, Heslop-Harrison P (J S, et al. 2022. A chromosome-level reference genome of Ensete glaucum gives insight into diversity and chromosomal and repetitive sequence evolution in the Musaceae. GigaScience [Internet] 11. Available from: https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giac027/6576245