ASSEMBLING THE COMPLETE GENOME OF MACAÚBA (ACROCOMIA ACULEATA): UNRAVELING THE GENETIC FUNCTIONS OF OIL PRODUCTION

Acrocomia aculeata, like many palm trees native to Latin America, has great socioeconomic relevance. Its occurrence occurs mainly in areas of open vegetation, being recognized for its adaptability to different environments and biomes. For the sequencing of its genome, the Oxford Nanopore nanopore technology was chosen, with extraction of high molecular weight DNA based on the adaptation of the Ashley Jones protocol. The pre-processing included sorbitol washes and magnetic bead purification to obtain genomic purity at 260/280 and 260/230 of 1.8 and 2.2, respectively. Four sequencing was performed with the P2 Solo and FLO-PRO114M flowcell equipment, generating 85 Gbp of data, with a sequence size profile between 7 Kbp and more than 25 Kbp, and an average Q score of 15. For processing, the electrical signals were converted to fastq using the SUP model of the Dorado program. The reduction of errors was done with the HERRO program, which uses two convolutional networks, decreasing the data to about 50 Gbp. An Illumina library was also generated, resulting in 250 Gbp of paired-end reads. Three assemblers were tested: Flye, Shasta, and Hifiasm, with assemblies ranging from 1.8 to 2.1 Gbp. The assembly correction was done with Polka and the SAMBA scaffolder of the MASURCA package, with two correction iterations. The N50 obtained was 167 Kbp, 205 Kbp and 1.1 Mbp, with 25,888, 23,929 and 4,804 contigs, respectively, for each assembler. The quality of the assembly was evaluated with the BUSCO tool, resulting in 97%, 96.6% and 98.4%