BioProject

Artemisia annua, commonly known as sweet wormwood and Qinghao, is a shrub native to China, which has long been used for medicinal purposes. More...

Artemisia annua, commonly known as sweet wormwood and Qinghao, is a shrub native to China, which has long been used for medicinal purposes. A. annua is now cultivated globally as the only natural source of a potent anti-malarial compound, artemisinin. Here, we report a high-quality assembly of the 1.793 Gigabase genome of A. annua, which is highly heterozygous, rich in repetitive sequences and contains more than 60,000 protein-coding genes, one of the largest numbers among the sequenced plant species. As the pioneer genome sequence of an Asteraceae species, the A. annua genome reveals a large number of genes specific to this large angiosperm clade. Notably, the expansion and functional diversification of genes encoding enzymes involved in terpene biosynthesis are consistent with the evolution of the artemisinin biosynthetic pathway. Transcriptome profiling further revealed the underlying transcriptional regulatory mechanism of artemisinin biosynthesis. High artemisinin yielding A. annua lines, developed based on the genome and transcriptional analyses, are now ready for large-scale production, thereby enhancing the security of the global supply. Less...