First high-quality genome assembly data of sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottboll)

Leonard Whye Kit Lim; Melinda Mei Lin Lau; Hung Hui Chung; Hasnain Hussain; Han Ming Gan

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2022.107800

First high-quality genome assembly data of sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottboll)

Data Brief. 2022 Jan 6:40:107800. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2022.107800. eCollection 2022 Feb.

Authors

Leonard Whye Kit Lim¹, Melinda Mei Lin Lau¹, Hung Hui Chung¹, Hasnain Hussain², Han Ming Gan^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Resource Science and Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300 Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia.
² Centre for Sago Research (CoSAR), Faculty of Resource Science and Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300 Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia.
³ GeneSEQ Sdn Bhd, Bukit Beruntung, 48300 Rawang, Selangor, Malaysia.
⁴ Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia.

Abstract

The sago palm (Metroxylon sagu Rottboll) is a tropical halophytic starch-producing, economically important crop palm mainly located in Southeast Asian countries. Recently, a genome survey was conducted on this palm using the Illumina sequencing platform, with a very low (21.5%) BUSCO genome completeness score, and most of them (∼78%) are either fragmented or missing. Thus, in this study, the sago palm genome completeness was further improved with the utilization of the Nanopore sequencing platform that produced longer reads. A hybrid genome assembly was conducted, and the outcome was a much complete sago palm genome with BUSCO completeness achieved at as high as 97.9%, with only ∼2% of them either fragmented or missing. The estimated genome size of the sago palm is 509,812,790 bp in this study. A sum of 33,242 protein-coding genes was revealed from the sago palm genome and around 96.39% of them had been functionally annotated. An investigation on the carbohydrate metabolism KEGG pathways also unearthed that starch synthesis was one of the major sago palm activities. The genome data obtained from this work is indispensable for future molecular evolutionary and genome-wide association studies on the economically important sago palm.

Keywords: BUSCO, Benchmarking Universal Single Copy Orthologs; Genome annotation; KEGG, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes; Metroxylon sagu; SDS, Sodium dodecyl sulfate; Sago palm; Starch synthesis; aa, amino acid; bp, base pair.