The Manuka Genome Project II

Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae), commonly known as Mānuka, is an indigenous shrub type tree with a wide-spread distribution throughout New Zealand. The species is found in range of habitats, including poorly drained environments, and is acknowledged as a nursery species for ecological restoration in degraded habitats. Mānuka is a source of high value essential oils, as well as high value honey with proven antimicrobial activities. Increased understanding of the species biology would be greatly beneficial to the New Zealand honey and essential oil industries. We used Illumina based next generation sequencing to develop both a draft genome assembly and a consensus transcriptome assembly of Manuka. The genome was assembled using a combination of the ALLPATHS-LG de novo assembler and SSPACE and resulted in 12,787 scaffolds covered 470 Mb with a longest scaffold length of 2.49 Mb, an N50 of 234 Kb, an N90 of 25 Kb. Analysis of ultraconserved eukaryotic genes (CEGs) using CEGMA indicated the genome to have a near complete representation of CEGS with 99.6% of the 248 completely or partial present. Assembly of the transcriptome yielded 36,687 de novo transcripts with 66,211 alternative forms following analysis of the assembled de novo transcripts using the Evigene pipeline. Gene model prediction, genome annotation and comparative analysis are currently in progress and will be reported on.