Rick Masonbrink

and 4 more

The soybean cyst nematode (Heterodera glycines) is a sedentary plant parasite that exceeds a billion dollars in yield losses annually. It has spread across the soybean-producing world, emerging as the primary pathogen of soybeans. This problem is exacerbated by H. glycines populations overcoming the limited sources of natural resistance in soybean and by the lack of effective and safe alternative treatments. Although there are genetic determinants that render soybean plants resistant to certain nematode genotypes, resistant soybean cultivars are increasingly ineffective because their multi-year usage has selected for virulent H. glycines populations. Successful H. glycines infection relies on the comprehensive re-engineering of soybean root cells into a syncytium, as well as the long-term suppression of host defenses to ensure syncytial viability. At the forefront of these complex molecular interactions are effectors, the proteins secreted by H. glycines into host root tissues. The mechanisms that control genomic effector acquisition, diversification, and selection are important insights needed for the development of essential novel control strategies. As a foundation to obtain this understanding, we developed a nine scaffold, 158Mb pseudomolecule assembly of the H. glycines genome using PacBio, Chicago, and Hi-C sequencing. An annotation of 22,465 genes was predicted using a Mikado pipeline informed by published short- and long-read expression data. Here we present results from our assembly and annotation of the H. glycines genome.