The genome of Ciborinia camelliae, a pathogen specific to Camellia flowers

Ciborinia camelliae Kohn is the causal agent of camellia flower blight. The pathogen infects only flowers of camellias, causing serious damage to the plant and economic damages to growers. European diversity of the strains was analysed by multilocus sequencing targeting GAPDH, EF1a, B-TUB2 and ITS regions. Strain diversity showed that some isolates obtained in Europe may originate from other regions where recombination may have occurred. To better decipher the genetic determinants of virulence in this species, the full genome sequence of an Italian strain of C. camellia was obtained with a hybrid approach combining Illumina Hiseq paired reads and MinIon Nanopore long reads sequencing. We obtained a genome with a total length of 48.01 Mb and 97.5% completeness according to BUSCO analysis. The genome was assembled into 55 contigs with a contig N of 2.01 Mb. Our work extends the knowledge on C. camelliae diversity and contributes to improving the knowledge on genomes of an important family of plant pathogens: Sclerotiniaceae.