Scientists created it by stitching together key parts of genomes from 144 varieties of wild and cultivated varieties of rice from Asia using ‘PacBio high-fidelity’ (HiFi) sequencing technology.

• Scientist also supported the hypothesis that all Asian cultivated rice had an evolutionary origin from a wild variety called Or-IIIa.
• Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) was domesticated from its wild progenitor O. rufipogon. 
  • Or-IIIa is a variant of O. rufipogon.

What is a Pangenome?

• It is a collection of genome sequences from many individuals of the same species. 
  • A genome is the complete set of genetic information in an organism.
• It is a kind of reference genome. 
  • Pangenome has the common genes as well as maps out the unique genes found in the individual varieties while, reference genomes generally confine themselves to identifying the characteristic genes that make up a species.

‘high-fidelity’ (HiFi) Sequencing Technology

• It is a single-molecule, real-time sequencing technology (SMRT) that provides incredible single-molecule read accuracy across long reads. 
• It is a kind of Long-read sequencing method of genome sequencing. 
  • Long-read sequencing is a DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) sequencing approach that enables the sequencing of much longer DNA fragments than traditional short-read sequencing methods.