Tang et. al. have written a timely review on the emerging role of optical mapping technologies as a tool in plant genome analysis. The authors provide a concise description of how optical mapping technologies work and provide a description of both current and future applications of these technologies in the study of plant genomes. Plant genomes, particularly those of domesticated varieties, are often repeat rich and have high ploidy which can result in gaps and misjoins in an assembly, respectively. The authors provide a good description with examples of how these problems can be overcome with optical mapping to construct ‘platinum’ quality reference genomes in domesticated plant species. The authors go on to further discuss the importance of understanding SVs for studying crop traits and plant evolution and present various approaches for using optical mapping for identifying SVs. Overall, this is an excellent review of the present and future applications of optical mapping in plant genomics and I do not feel any revisions are necessary for it's publication.

Level of interest An article of outstanding merit and interest in its field Quality of written English Acceptable Statistical review No, the manuscript does not need to be seen by a statistician. Declaration of competing interests I declare that I have no competing interests