Genome assemblies and annotation of Z. luxurians 'You12' and maize 'H057'

We generated 138.8 Gb and 125.1 Gb accurate PacBio HiFi reads for Z. luxurians ‘You12’ and maize ‘H057’. Primary genome assemblies using hifiasm (Cheng et al. 2021) resulted in 3.62 Gb for ‘You12’ (N50 = 225 Mb) and 2.19 Gb for ‘H057’ (N50 = 163 Mb). Both assemblies achieved 98.7% BUSCO completeness. Hi-C scaffolding resulted in 10 long scaffolds (>100 Mb) for both genome. Their scaffolds were named and oriented based on their homology to the maize ‘B73’ reference genome (v5) (Hufford et al. 2021). Using the BRAKER3 pipeline (Gabriel et al. 2024), we annotated the two genomes by combining transcriptomic data from roots, shoots, leaves, and stems, together with homologous protein information from maize B73, leading to the identification of 33,212 protein-coding genes in Z. luxurians ‘You12’ and 32,908 in maize ‘H057’. In conclusion, the parental genomes were assembled at high quality, revealing that the Z. luxurians ‘You12’ genome is 1.65 times larger than that of maize ‘H057’.