"A genome assembly of the California flannelbush, Fremontodendron californicum"

Fremontodendron (Malvaceae) is a genus of shrubs native to the California Floristic Province (CFP) with dense, stellate trichomes on their leaves (hence the common name "flannelbush"). The current treatment of the genus includes the widespread and morphologically variable species Fremontodendron californicum, along with the rare F. decumbens and F. mexicanum. While F. californicum is spread across several ecoregions of the CFP, F. decumbens and F. mexicanum are highly restricted. Here, we introduce the first genome-scale resource with which to study this important genus, a de novo, scaffold scale assembly of an individual of F. californicum. Following the overall strategy of the California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP), we used Pacific Biosciences HiFi long reads and Omni-C chromatin mapping to produce an assembly of the nuclear and plastid (chloroplast) genomes. The nuclear assembly consists of two, phased haplotypes, haplotypes one and two, with similar sizes of around 1.2 Gb, similar scaffold N50s around 26 Mb, and each with a Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Ortholog (BUSCO) completeness score of 99.4%. This assembly will be a valuable resource for understanding the distribution, genetic variation, and species delimitation of this California genus of conservation value, as well as a tool to further investigate the complex evolutionary history of Malvaceae s.l.