A near-complete assembly of an Arabidopsis thaliana genome

The genome sequence of Arabidopsis thaliana, a widely adopted model species, has greatly expedited plant molecular biology research. Over 20 years after the first release of the genome sequence (Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, 2000), there remains unresolved gap regions that are presumably composed of highly repetitive sequences, such as telomeres, centromeres, 5S rDNA clusters, and nucleolar organizer regions (NORs) containing 45S rDNA. It is difficult to assemble such repeats using comparatively short sequencing reads.