Abstract
The Date Palm Genome Project of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a comprehensive genome research project aimed at sequencing the date palm genome to completion, deciphering the transcriptomes and understanding the biology of date palm for improved cultivation and pest prevention. We introduce plant genomics and its technological advancement, tools and resources used for plant genomics and the scope, goals and recent progress of the Project. Up to date, we generated about 30 M 454 reads (similar to 15x coverage) and have assembly it into 226,501 contigs, with a total length of 416,498,895 bps. In addition, we achieved the whole 158,462 bp double-stranded circular plastid genome, which with a typical quadripartite structure of the large (LSC, 86,198 bp) and small single copy (SSC, 17,712 bp) regions separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRs, 27,276 bp). Moreover, in excess of 5,000,000 date palm cDNAs have been sequenced by a 454 sequencer, and these EST sequences will play an important role for date palm genome assembly and gene annotation. In future, more than 100x coverage of SOLID long mate pair reads will be used to increase the quality of genome assembly, and used to construct scaffolds. Further analysis of date palm genome will be performed in the coming months.