Sequencing data and assembly of three coral species : Porites lobata, Porites evermanni and Pocillopora cf. effusa.

Over the last decade, several coral genomes have been sequenced allowing a better understanding of these symbiotic organisms threatened by climate change. Scleractinian corals are reef builders and are central to these ecosystems, providing habitat and food to a great diversity of species. In the frame of the Tara Pacific expedition, we generated two coral genomes, Porites lobata and Pocillopora cf. effusa with vastly improved contiguity that allowed us to study the functional organisation of these genomes. We annotated their gene catalog and reported a relatively higher gene number than that found in other public coral genome sequences. This finding is explained by a high number of tandemly duplicated genes, which are generally difficult to assemble and annotate using short-read sequencing technologies. These duplicated genes, which we show to originate from multiple and distinct duplication events in the coral lineage, belong to gene-families linked to the immune system and disease-resistance that we suggest to be functionally linked to coral host resilience. At large, we show the importance of previously missed duplicated genes to inform the biology of reef-building corals, which provide novel avenues to understand and screen for differences in stress resilience. This project collects the sequencing data and the assembly of three coral species : Porites lobata, Porites evermanni and Pocillopora cf. effusa.