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.