About Quinoa Genome DataBase
Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.; 2n=4x=36) is a pseudocereal crop of the Amaranthaceae family. Quinoa shows high drought tolerance and provides an exceptional nutritional source such as minerals and vitamins. Owing to these characters, quinoa has been gaining greater international attention as an important crop with the potential to contribute to food security worldwide.

We generated a draft assembly of the quinoa genome using short reads of Illumina HiSeq2500 and long reads of PacBio RSII. We obtained short reads of 290.8 Gb and long reads of 45.8 Gb.

After assembling the short reads, further scaffolding and gap-closing were performed using the long reads. Totally, we determined 24,847 scaffolds as the draft genome sequence (Cqu_r1.0). The total length of Cqu_r1.0 was 1,087,413,657 bp and the N50 of the scaffolds was 86,941 bp. Gene prediction analysis revealed 226,647 coding sequences (CDSs; Cqu_r1.0_cds). The total length of Cqu_r1.0_cds was 190,451,495 bp.

Of these, the functions of 62,512 CDSs were annotated by BLAST analysis of the NCBI NR databases. Cqu_r1.0, Cqu_r1.0_cds and their deduced amino acid sequences (Cqu_r1.0_pep), BLAST annotations, and the results of a domain search against InterPro are opened on this website, the Quinoa Genome DataBase (QGDB).

We really hope the QGDB will be utilized as a valuable resource that can be used in efforts to reveal the mechanisms underlying useful traits of quinoa.

References
Draft genome sequence of an inbred line of Chenopodium quinoa, an allotetraploid crop with great environmental adaptability and outstanding nutritional properties
Yasui Y, Hirakawa H, Oikawa T, Toyoshima M, Matsuzaki C, Ueno M, Mizuno N, Nagatoshi Y, Imamura T, Miyago M, Tanaka K, Mise K, Tanaka T, Mizukoshi H, Mori M, Fujita Y
DNA research, Volume 23, Issue 6, December 2016, Pages 535–546