A pan-TE map highlights transposable elements underlying domestication and agronomic traits in Asian rice
Xiaoxia Li, Xiaofan Dai, Huiying He, Yang Lv, Longbo Yang, Wenchuang He, Congcong Liu, Hua Wei, Xiangpei Liu, Qiaoling Yuan, Xianmeng Wang, Tianyi Wang, Bintao Zhang, Hong Zhang, Wu Chen, Yue Leng, Xiaoman Yu, Hongge Qian, Bin Zhang, Mingliang Guo, Zhipeng Zhang, Chuanlin Shi, Qianqian Zhang, Yan Cui, Qiang Xu, Xinglan Cao, Dandan Chen, Yongfeng Zhou, Qian Qian, Lianguang ShangAbstract
Transposable elements (TEs) are ubiquitous genomic components and hard to study due to their highly repetitive. Here we assembled 232 chromosome-level genomes based on long-reads sequencing data. Coupling with 15 existing assemblies, we developed a pan-TE map comprising both cultivated and wild Asian rice. We detected 177 084 high-quality TE variations and inferred their derived state using outgroups. We found TEs were one source of phenotypic variation during rice domestication and differentiation. We identified 1 246 genes whose expression variation was associated with TEs but not SNPs, such as OsRbohB, and validated OsRbohB’s relative expression activity using dual-LUC reporter assays system. Our pan-TE map allowed us to detect multiple novel loci associated with agronomic traits. Collectively, our findings highlight the contributions of TEs to domestication, differentiation, and agronomic traits in rice, and there is a massive potential for gene cloning and molecular breeding by the high-quality Asian pan-TE map we generated.