The genome assembly and annotation of Chinese fir

Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) stands as one of China’s most pivotal timber tree species, cultivated and utilized for millennia. Despite its historical significance, the absence of genome data has impeded our understanding of its domestication and genetic improvement. Here, we employed PacBio HiFi (~70×) and Hi-C (~109×) sequencing to obtain a de novo genome assembly, comprising ~11.50 Gb assembled in 21,21 contigs (N50 number = 224, N50 length = 15 Mb), with 99.04% (1,579 contigs totaling ~11.39 Gb) of these contigs anchored to the 11 pseudo-chromosomes. BUSCO analysis showed that this genome assembly recovered 100% (255) of the complete eukaryota_odb10 dataset and 91.7% (1,480) of the embryophyta_odb10 dataset. Integrating homolog-based, ab initio and RNA-seq-based predictions, we defined a total of 50,609 ‘high-confidence’ protein-coding genes in the C. lanceolata genome.