Genomic sequence reads need to be assembled into contiguous genomic sequence fragments. These genomic sequence reads are from palms native to the Americas. The purpose of this project is to use the genomic data to produce a phylogeny over all palms native to the Americas, as well as a reference genome for one of these palms, Euterpe precatoria. These genetic data will then be used for macroevolutionary and population genetic analyses. Raw reads produced from sequencing need to be processed in order to produce the longer contiguous sequences that can be compared between species and therefore reveal their relative closeness in relationship or used to analyse a complete genome of a species.