Haplotype-resolved chromosome-level genome assembly of Ehretia macrophylla

Abstract

Abstract Ehretia macrophylla Wall, known as wild loquat, is an ecologically, economically, and medicinally significant tree species widely grown in China, Japan, Vietnam, and Nepal. In this study, we have successfully generated a haplotype-resolved chromosome-scale genome assembly of E. macrophylla by integrating PacBio HiFi long-reads, Illumina short-reads, and Hi-C data. The genome assembly consists of two haplotypes, with sizes of 1.82 Gb and 1.58 Gb respectively, and contig N50 lengths of 28.11 Mb and 21.57 Mb correspondingly. Additionally, 99.41% of the assembly was successfully anchored into 40 pseudo-chromosomes. We predicted 58,886 protein-coding genes, of which 99.60% were functionally annotated from databases. We furthermore detected 2.65 Gb repeat sequences, 659,290 rRNAs, 4,931 tRNAs and 4,688 other ncRNAs. The high-quality assembly of the genome offers a solid basis for furthering the fields of molecular breeding and functional genomics of E. macrophylla.