bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.31.446451; this version posted May 31, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Lessons from 20 years of plant genome sequencing: an unprecedented resource in need of more diverse representation Authors: Rose A. Marks1,2,3, Scott Hotaling4, Paul B. Frandsen5,6, and Robert VanBuren1,2 1. Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA 2. Plant Resilience Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA 3. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa 4. School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA 5. Department of Plant and Wildlife Sciences, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA 6. Data Science Lab, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA Keywords: plants, embryophytes, genomics, colonialism, broadening participation Correspondence: Rose A. Marks, Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA; Email:
[email protected]; Phone: (603) 852-3190; ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7102-5959 Abstract The field of plant genomics has grown rapidly in the past 20 years, leading to dramatic increases in both the quantity and quality of publicly available genomic resources. With an ever- expanding wealth of genomic data from an increasingly diverse set of taxa, unprecedented potential exists to better understand the evolution and genome biology of plants.