In this study, the BNG Irys platform provided affordable, high‐throughput physical maps of improved contiguity to validate the draft assembly (Hirakawa et al., 2016) generated across a combination of long‐read and short‐read platforms and extended scaffolds. In contrast to alternative, sequencing‐based approaches (e.g. Chicago method of Dovetail Genomics, GemCode Technology of 10× Genomics, or Hi‐C), it enables a highly accurate sizing of gaps in sequence assemblies and provides a real picture of genomic regions intractable to current sequencing technologies, such as long arrays of tandem repeats (Staňková et al., 2016). Thus, combinations of platforms are recommended and no one platform is a perfect technology to use in answering every research question (Chaney et al., 2016).