Plectropomus leopardus genome

<em>Plectropomus leopardus</em>, as known as leopard coral grouper, is a valuable marine fish that has been gradually artificial breeding. To promote future conservation, molecular breeding and comparative studies, we generated an improved high-quality chromosomal-level genome assembly of leopard coral grouper using Nanopore long-reads, BGI short reads, and the Hi-C sequencing data, as well as protein-coding genes predicted <em>de novo</em> and verified using sufficient transcriptome data. The draft genome of 849.74Mb with 45 contigs and N50 of 35.59 Mb. Finally, a total of 846.49 Mb (99.6%) of based were anchored to 24 pseudo-chromosomes using Hi-C technology. A final set of 27,285 genes is annotated after manual curation of the predicted gene models, and BUSCO analysis yielded a completeness score of 99.5%. This study significantly improves the utility of the grouper genome and is a reference for the study of molecular breeding and fish genomics and biology.