Supporting data for "A Hybrid de novo Assembly of the Sea Pansy (<i>Renilla muelleri</i>) Genome"

Over 3,000 species of octocorals (Cnidaria, Anthozoa) inhabit an expansive range of environments, from shallow tropical seas to the deep-ocean floor. They are important foundation species that create coral forests, which provide unique niches and three-dimensional living space for other organisms. The octocoral genus <i>Renilla</i> inhabits sandy, continental shelves in the subtropical and tropical Atlantic and eastern Pacific Oceans. <i>Renilla</i> is especially interesting because it produces secondary metabolites for defense, exhibits bioluminescence, and produces a luciferase that is widely used in dual-reporter assays in molecular biology. Although several cnidarian genomes are currently available, the majority of these are hexacorals. Here, we present a de novo assembly of an azooxanthellate shallow-water octocoral, <i>R. muelleri</i>. <br>We generated a hybrid de novo assembly using the Maryland Super-Read Celera Assembler v.3.2.6 (MaSuRCA). The final assembly included 4,825 scaffolds and a haploid genome size of 172 Mb. A BUSCO assessment found 88% of metazoan orthologs present in the genome. An Augustus ab initio gene prediction found 23,660 genes, of which 66% (15,635) had detectable similarity to annotated genes from the starlet sea anemone, <i>Nematostella vectensis</i> or to the Uniprot database. Although the <i>R. muelleri</i>genome may be smaller (172 Mb minimum size) than other publicly available coral genomes (256-448 Mb), the <i>R. muelleri</i> genome is similar to other coral genomes in terms of the number of complete metazoan BUSCOs and predicted gene models.<br> The <i>R. mueller</i>i hybrid genome provides a novel resource for researchers to investigate the evolution of genes and gene families within Octocorallia and more widely across Anthozoa. It will be a key resource for future comparative genomics with other corals and for understanding the genomic basis of coral diversity.