Scientific Data (Dec 2024)

A high-quality chromosome-level genome assembly of the traditional Chinese medicinal herb Zanthoxylum nitidum

  • Yanxia Zhu,
  • Guiyu Tan,
  • Qingsong Dong,
  • Baoyou Huang,
  • Yude Peng,
  • Jianping Jiang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04174-3
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 13

Abstract

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Abstract Dried roots of Zanthoxylum nitidum (2n=2x=70, family Rutaceae) was referred as “Liang-Mian-Zhen” in Chinese, acting as a valuable species due to its notable pharmacological activities. Herein, we combined PacBio HiFi data together with Hi-C mapping technology to construct a chromosome-scale reference genome assembly for Z. nitidum. The assembly reached a length of 2.24 Gb, successfully anchoring 99.31% of sequences onto 35 pseudo-chromosomes. Among these, 26 chromosomes achieved telomere-to-telomere assembly, and 11 chromosomes were gap-free. The contigs N50 and scaffolds N50 reached 57.61 Mb and 78.00 Mb, respectively. Transposable elements comprised 81.44% of the Z. nitidum genome, and over 78% of them were long-terminal repeat retrotransposon elements. Furthermore, 32,737 protein-coding genes were identified and 99.38% of all were functionally annotated. The completeness of the genome assembly and final gene sets reached 97.83% and 96.47% based on Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO), respectively. Taken together, our results provided a high-quality chromosome-level assembly of Z. nitidum genome and will be a valuable resource that will facilitate breeding varieties with higher alkaloids content.