Streptochaeta angustifolia: a Keystone Genome for Understanding Evolution of Cereals and Grains

The grass family (Poaceae) encompasses more than 10,000 species making it one of the largest families in the plant kingdom. The members of this family have adapted to numerous environments and are globally distributed and ubiquitous. Grasses are also economically important as they include both cereals (wheat, maize, rice, barley, and oats) and minor grains (rye and various millets). Much of our understanding of grass evolution comes from comparative genomic studies of domesticated cereal crops and their wild relatives. An ancestral genome in the grass phylogeny will allow us to better understand genome evolution of the grasses over deeper evolutionary time and will allow us to identify the innovations that have caused these species to be so successful and widespread. Here we report the draft genome assembly for Streptochaeta angustifolia. The assembly was generated using the MaSuRCA (v 2.3.2) assembler and the XSEDE High Performance Computing cluster (Blacklight). The total size of assembled scaffolds is approximately 98 % of the genome size, with a N50 of 2.4 Mb and L50 of 170.  There were a total of 237 (95.56 %) CEGMA genes and  907 (94.8%) BUSCO genes predicted from the assembly.