ICAR has developed India's first fully
annotated Telomere-to-Telomere reference genome of the pigeonpea variety 'Asha'
¨
Indian Council of
Agricultural Research (ICAR) has developed India's first fully annotated
Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) reference genome of the pigeonpea variety 'Asha'.
¨
The genome assembly,
NIPB_CcT2T_4, was released on 20 April 2026.
¨
It is available in the
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database under accession
number GCF_000230855.1.
¨
A Telomere-to-Telomere
(T2T) genome is a complete chromosome-level DNA sequence extending from one
telomere to the other.
¨
The 'Asha' genome
comprises 752.65 million base pairs, 92 contigs, 11 chromosomes, 11
centromeres, and 22 telomeres.
¨
Genome annotation is the
process of identifying genes and functional elements within a DNA sequence.
¨
The annotated 'Asha'
genome contains 36,557 genes and 48,008 mRNAs.
¨
It achieved more than
99.9% read alignment accuracy.
¨
The ICAR–National
Institute for Plant Biotechnology (NIPB) published the world's first draft
genome of a pulse crop in 2011 and an improved version in 2017.
¨
Pigeonpea, also known as
red gram (arhar/tur), is one of India's major pulse crops.
