Short read assemblies of diverse Acacia species

The genus Acacia is the largest genus of plants in Australia, containing a remarkable amount of phenotype diversity and occupy all of the continent’s climatic zones (McLay et al. 2022; Renner et al. 2020; 2021). Multiple recent studies have reported the assembly of Acacia genomes at the chromosome level using long read technologies (A. pycnantha, McLay et al. 2022;* A. confusa*, Chen et al. 2024; A. crassicarpa, Massaro et al. 2024; A. melanoxylon, Zhang et al. 2025). However, these sequencing efforts have been relatively restricted with major phylogenetic sections remain unrepresented, including the section Botrycephalae and the sister genus Paraserianthes. Genomes from these groups will better enable analyses of leaf morphological evolution within the genus Acacia and a better understanding of the origin of the genus since splitting from Paraserianthes nearly 23 million years ago (Macphail and Hill 2001). In this work, we generate a number of short read draft assemblies for six unsequenced Acacia species, one Paraserianthes species, and an additional genome for A. confusa. These short read libraries and their associated assemblies will be resources for comparative genomics of the genus, and can be used to inform further sequencing efforts for this group.