Format: ORAL

Lucia Campos-Dominguez1,2, Alexandros Bousios3, Max Brown4, Robin Burns5, Wellcome Sanger Institute Tree of Life programme, Wellcome Sanger Institute Scientific Operations: DNA Pipelines collective, Tree of Life Core Informatics collective, Darwin Tree of Life Consortium, Ian Henderson5, Ilia Leitch6, Alex D. Twyford7

1. Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona-Universitat de Barcelona, 08193 Barcelona, Spain 2. Ashworth Laboratories, Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FL, UK 3. School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK 4. School of Life Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, East Rd, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK 5. Department of Plant Sciences, Downing Street, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EA, UK. 6. Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology Department, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB, U.K.

The European mistletoe (Viscum album) is an obligate hemiparasitic plant from the Santalaceae family. Although it is a well known plant for its many uses and traditions, evolutionary and genomic studies on mistletoe are rare due to its haploid genome size, which can vary from 85 Gbp up to 105 Gbp (more than 30 human genomes). This makes mistletoes one of the eudicot genera with the largest genomes. We have sequenced, assembled and curated the Viscum album genome to generate the largest high-quality, chromosome-level genome published to date. Moreover, here we present preliminary results not only on the genome assembly data but on the analysis of the repetitive fraction of the genome, including TE distribution as well as telomere and centromere repeat analyses. Our efforts are resulting in the first in-depth insights on a giant genome structure, which represents an invaluable resource for studies on the evolutionary processes underlying the evolution of genome obesity.