Chromosome-scale genomes of five Hongmu species in Leguminosae

Abstract

The Legume family (Leguminosae or Fabaceae), is one of the largest and economically important flowering plants. Heartwood, the core of a tree trunk or branch, is a valuable and renewable resource employed for centuries in constructing sturdy and sustainable structures. Hongmu refers to a category of precious timber trees in China, encompassing 29 woody species, primarily from the legume genus. Due to the lack of genome data, detailed studies on their economic and ecological importance are limited. Therefore, this study generates chromosome-scale assemblies of five Hongmu species in Leguminosae: Pterocarpus santalinus, Pterocarpus macrocarpus, Dalbergia cochinchinensis, Dalbergia cultrata, and Senna siamea, using a combination of short-reads, long-read nanopore, and Hi-C data. We obtained 623.86 Mb, 634.58 Mb, 700.60 Mb, 645.98 Mb, and 437.29 Mb of pseudochromosome level assemblies with the scaffold N50 lengths of 63.1 Mb, 63.7 Mb, 70.4 Mb, 61.1 Mb and 32.2 Mb for P. santalinus, P. macrocarpus, D. cochinchinensis, D. cultrata and S. siamea, respectively. These genome data will serve as a valuable resource for studying crucial traits, like wood quality, disease resistance, and environmental adaptation in Hongmu.

Beyond NGS data sharing for plant ecological resilience and improvement of agronomic traits

“…Generating genomic information and deciphering genetic architecture are crucial for conserving and developing timber species, contributing to improved forest productivity, wood quality, resilience, and sustainability. The collection included chromosome scale genome assemblies of some commercial timber trees 9 – 11 . Sahu et al .…”

“… 9 , 10 employed the de novo assembly program, Supernova to assemble diploid genomes of commercial timber trees and Mahogany species, whereas Yang et al . 11 utilized the genome assemblers NECAT and NextDenovo in Hongmu species. The genomic data obtained from these forest trees will be a valuable resource for studying essential traits associated with environmental adaptation, including wood density, growth rate, disease resistance, hardness, and fiber cell wall thickness.…”