Chromosome-scale genome assembly of the ‘Munstead’ cultivar of Lavandula angustifolia

Abstract

Lavandula angustifolia (English lavender) is commercially important not only as an ornamental species but also as a major source of fragrances. To better understand the genomic basis of chemical diversity in lavender, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated the ‘Munstead’ cultivar of L. angustifolia. A total of 80 Gb of Oxford Nanopore Technologies reads was used to assemble the ‘Munstead’ genome using the Canu genome assembler software. Following multiple rounds of error correction and scaffolding using Hi-C data, the final chromosome-scale assembly represents 795,075,733 bp across 25 chromosomes with an N50 scaffold length of 31,371,815 bp. Benchmarking Universal Single Copy Orthologs analysis revealed 98.0% complete orthologs, indicative of a high-quality assembly representative of genic space. Annotation of protein-coding sequences revealed 58,702 high-confidence genes encoding 88,528 gene models. Access to the ‘Munstead’ genome will permit comparative analyses within and among lavender accessions and provides a pivotal species for comparative analyses within Lamiaceae.