Ensete ventricosum

Ensete ventricosum, also known as the Ethiopian banana or enset, is a perennial plant native to Ethiopia and parts of East Africa. It belongs to the Musaceae family. Ensete ventricosum is an important crop in Ethiopia, particularly in the southern regions where it is grown on a large scale. It is a hardy plant that can tolerate drought, making it an important source of food security for many people in the region.

The genome sequence  of this species is the result of the collaboration between Kew Garden, Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, Hawassa University and Queen Mary of London University. More info here.

Seeds of a cultivar called Maze was collected, its genome was sequenced by PacBio Sequel and Illumina HiSeq technologies and scaffolded using Omni-C. More details at NCBI.

Notice: The version of the genome distributed here is different from the one in NCBI.

• First 9 scaffolds were renamed into chromosome and reordered based on synteny with E. glaucum
• 8 out the 9 chromosomes were reverted by consistency with other sequenced genomes
• Nomenclature was applied to locus names
• Functional annotation was performed