show Abstracthide AbstractThis project investigates potential genome structure or sequence differences between phenotypic variants of the R7A strain (dubbed R7Astar) which exhibit a constitutive N-(3-Oxohexanoyl)-L-homoserine lactone production and higher rates of Integrative & Conjugative Element (ICE) chromosomal excision and transfer.The R7A assembly is a high-quality reference sequence for wild-type R7A used for genome comparisons in this study. The R7A sequence assembly is a de novo assembly of the wild-type Mesorhizobium japonicum strain R7A genome, constructed using filtered (> q10 and > 8 kb ) nanopore minion reads with 186-fold filtered mapped-read depth. The assembly was polished with previously generated illumina reads (SRA accessions SRX1963559-SRX1963562) with 560-fold mapped-read depth.The R7Astar assembly is a high-quality reference sequence for the first-isolated R7Astar variant and is used for genome comparisons in this study. The R7Astar sequence assembly is a de novo assembly of the R7Astar variant, constructed using filtered (> q10 and > 30 kb) nanopore minion reads with 194-fold filtered mapped-read depth. The assembly was polished with reads generated on an Illumina Nextseq with 252-fold mapped-read depth. R7Astar differs from R7A by three nucleotide substitutions.Additional variants derived from R7A and R7Astar were sequenced using illumina sequencing and genome assemblies are reference-based assemblies based the genomes above.