New and improved genome assembly for Safflower using PacBio HiFi reads, Optical Mapping and Hi-C
New and improved genome assembly of Safflower was generated using sequencing approaches such as 1. PacBio HiFi reads  2. Optical Mapping and 3. Hi-C. PacBio HiFi reads are a part of long-read sequencing technology, which was used for contruction of contig-level primary assembly. Optical mapping was used for scaffolding whereas Hi-C was used for construction of chromosome level assembly. Illumina reads were used for the  polishing the genome assembly. A final assembly of 1.09 Gb comprising 12 chromosomes was constructed using the above technologies. The improved assembly showed high BUSCO completeness of 97.9 percent. The high quality of the safflower genome was confirmed by high mapping back frequency of 99.3 percent and 94.37 percent the Pacbio and illumina reads respectively.