Draft genome assembly of the biofuel grass crop .

(Maxim.) Hack. is a highly productive C4 perennial rhizomatous biofuel grass crop. is among the most widely distributed species in the genus, particularly at cold northern latitudes, and is one of the progenitor species of the commercial genotypes. We generated a 2.54 Gb whole-genome assembly of the diploid cv. "Robustus 297" genotype, which represented ~59% of the expected total genome size. We later anchored this assembly using the chromosomes from the genome to generate a second assembly with improved contiguity. We annotated 86,767 and 69,049 protein-coding genes in the unanchored and anchored assemblies, respectively. We estimated our assemblies included ~85% of the genes based on homology and core markers. The utility of the new reference for genomic studies was evidenced by a 99% alignment rate of the RNA-seq reads from the same genotype.  The raw data, unanchored and anchored assemblies, and respective gene annotations are publicly available.