BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese institutes have released a complete assembly of the reference genome of Nipponbare rice, according to the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen (AGIS).

In 2005, the reference genome of the current commonly used Nipponbare rice was initially released, confirming that this rice research had entered the era of genomics.

However, there was a long-standing barrier that had hidden three percent of the genome from sequence-based analysis due to the limitations of sequencing and assembly technology at the time.

The AGIS cooperated with the China National Rice Research Institute, the Institute of Crop Science of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Yangzhou University to produce a complete assembly of the rice reference genome T2T-NIP and achieve a complete sequence of this important rice reference genome with 385.7 million base pairs.

T2T-NIP contains 12.5 million base pairs of newly identified sequence, according to the research article recently published in the journal Molecular Plant.

The achievement unlocked complex regions of the genome for rice variational and functional studies, said the article.