Genomic data of the Chinese alligator (<em>Alligator sinensis</em>).

The Chinese alligator (<em>Alligator sinensis</em>), a freshwater crocodilian endemic to China, is one of the most endangered crocodilian species. Currently, there are ~100 Chinese alligators in the wild and ~10 000 captive individuals in Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces. We chose the Chinese alligator for genome sequencing with the hope of providing information that could help design scientific captive-breeding programs for population recovery project of this endangered species. <br>DNA from the chinese aligator was collected in Zhejiang Province, China. We sequenced the 2.3Gb genome with short reads from a series of libraries with various insert sizes ( 170bp, 500bp, 800bp, 2kb, 5kb, 10kb and 20kb) on a HiSeq 2000 sequencer.<br>The assembled scaffolds of high quality sequences total 314Gb, with the contig and scaffold N50 values of 23.4kb and 2.2Mb respectively. We identified 22,200 protein-coding genes with an mean length of 1403bp.