Genome assemblies of Arabidopsis thaliana accessions Jm-0 and Elk-3 using HiFi and ONT long-reads
Centromeres ensure chromosome segregation during cell division. In plants, they contain CENH3-variant nucleosomes, essential for kinetochore formation and spindle microtubule interaction. Plant centromeres are frequently composed of megabase-scale satellite repeat arrays, or retrotransposon nests. In Arabidopsis thaliana, pericentromeric heterochromatin flanks the CENH3 regions, suppressing meiotic crossovers. This study examines how natural genetic variation in Arabidopsis affects centromere-proximal crossover frequency and segregation distortion during meiosis when homologous centromeres differ structurally. We used fluorescent crossover reporters to survey the effect of natural variation on centromere-proximal recombination in twelve F1 hybrids involving twelve natural strains, capturing Arabidopsis Eurasian and relict diversity.  This project collects the PacBio HiFi and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) genomic long-reads and the corresponding telomere-to-telomere genome assemblies of Arabidopsis thaliana accessions Jm-0 (ecotype ID: 8313) and Elk-3 (ecotype ID: ), respectively. The remaining ten genome assemblies are part of the Arabidopsis Pancentromere project, which can be found in the in the ENA database under Study Accession PRJEB55353.