The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has produced India's first fully annotated Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) reference genome, for the pigeonpea variety 'Asha'.
The genome spans 752.65 million base pairs across 11 chromosomes, with 11 centromeres and 22 telomeres, and contains 36,557 genes and 48,008 mRNAs at over 99.9% read-alignment accuracy. Pigeonpea (red gram, arhar) is a major pulse of the Fabaceae family, and the genome will help breed high-yielding, climate-resilient varieties.