Introduction
Ceratonia siliqua L., or carob, is a flowering evergreen tree or shrub in the legume family, Fabaceae. It is widely cultivated for its edible fruit pods, and as an ornamental tree in gardens and landscapes. The carob tree is native to the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. Portugal is the largest producer of carob, followed by Italy and Morocco (Brassesco et al. 2021).
In the Mediterranean Basin, extended to the southern Atlantic coast of Portugal, carob pods are often used as animal feed. The ripe, dried, and sometimes toasted pods are often grounded into carob powder, which can be used as an alternative to cocoa powder.
Methods
A single leaf from a Moroccan cultivated tree was used for this study. DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNAeasy genomic extraction kit using the standard process. A paired-end sequencing library was constructed using the Illumina TruSeq kit, according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The library was sequenced on an Illumina Hi-Seq platform in paired-end, 2 × 150bp format. The resulting fastq files were trimmed of adapter/primer sequence and low-quality regions with Trimmomatic v0.33 (Bolger, Lohse, and Usadel 2014). The trimmed sequence was assembled by SPAdes v2.5 (Bankevich et al. 2012) followed by a finishing step using Zanfona v1.0 (Kieras 2021) to make additional contig joins based on conserved regions in related species.
Data availability
Raw reads (SRR24502586) and the assembled genome (JASKGM000000000) are available in Genbank.
Funding
Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes, grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345 Genomic Studies of Eukaryotic Taxa
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare they have no conflicts of interests.