The telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of the wild mulberry, Morus mongolica

Morus mongolica is a wild mulberry native to China and North Korea. In the current study, we assembled a high-quality telomere-to-telomere genome sequence of M. mongolica using NGS, HiFi, ONT, and Hi-C technologies. The genome was determined to be 341.88 Mb in size with a contig N50 of 23.82 Mb. The numbers of telomeres and centromeres were 28 and 14, with average lengths of 9.86 kb and 1.91 Mb, accounting for 0.08% and 7.84% of the total genome, respectively. A total of 21,657 protein-coding genes and 186.50 Mb repeat sequences were annotated. Genome integrity evaluation by BUSCO revealed a completeness score of 99.44% and a quality value of 46.7. Collinearity analysis between M. mongolica and either Morus alba or Morus notabilis showed that the breakage and fusion of chromosomes in Morus occurred at the centromere region of M. notabilis, which provided important genomic evidence for the evolution and chromosome breakage-fusion mechanism of Morus species.