The genome sequence of Mesua ferrea and comparative demographic histories of forest trees

Mesua ferrea (Family: Calophyllaceae) is a tropical forest plant used for timber, biofuel, and traditional medicine. Colloquially, it known as Nagkesar (Cobra saffron) the state flower of Tripura (India). In this study, we perform whole-genome assembly using ~180X coverage paired-end Illumina data. Our de novo 614 Mega-base pair (Mbp), has an N50 392 Kilo-base pairs (Kbp), quality comparable to other published Malpighiales genomes. Further, collate genomic datasets 14 additional tree species compare temporal dynamics Effective Population Size (Ne) find evidence substantial bottleneck in all plants during Mid-Pleistocene glaciations. The availability high-quality draft genome will prove be useful resource functional comparative studies.