Rice is an important food crop, and its genome assembly is of great significance for rice breeding. On the 23rd, the reporter learned from the Shenzhen Agricultural Genome Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences that the institute, in collaboration with multiple units such as the Yazhou Bay Laboratory, the China Rice Research Institute, the Crop Science Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Yangzhou University, has released a complete rice reference genome, achieving seamless assembly of all chromosome telomeres to telomeres in the whole genome, providing a new powerful tool and important big data foundation for rice breeding research. The relevant research results were recently published in Molecular Plant. In 2005, the genome sketch of the rice variety "Nippon Hare" was released, officially ushering in the era of genomics in rice research. Subsequently, the "Nippon Haruki" reference genome was further updated in 2013, significantly improving genome assembly results and gene annotation, becoming the standard reference genome for rice, which has been used to this day. However, due to limitations in sequencing and assembly technology at that time, there were gaps in the assembly of complex structural regions in the genome, which accounted for about 3% of the total length. These gaps hindered the research process of rice breeding. The corresponding author of the paper and researcher at the Shenzhen Institute of Agricultural Genomics, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shang Lianguang, introduced that for this purpose, the research team used rice "Nihon Hare" as the material and comprehensively utilized next-generation sequencing technology to complete the assembly of the "Nihon Hare" reference genome. Its size is 385.7 million base pairs, and each chromosome is composed of a complete and continuous sequence from telomere to telomere, with a base accuracy of over 99.9999%, The latest assembly has added a genome sequence of 12.5 million base pairs, mainly unlocking the most complex ribosomal DNA sequences, centromere regions, complex transposon sequences, and telomere regions in the rice genome. Multiple gene structure errors caused by gaps have been corrected, and 1324 protein coding gene annotations have been added. This study has laid an important theoretical foundation for rice breeding research. (Reporter Ma Aiping, Correspondent Ma Xinyi) (Xinhua News Agency)