diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index b8bdd62f..5bc0d765 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -1,3 +1,28 @@
+Release 2.1-r311 (25 August 2017)
+---------------------------------
+
+This release adds spliced alignment for long noisy RNA-seq reads. On a SMRT
+Iso-Seq and a Oxford Nanopore data sets, minimap2 appears to outperform
+traditional mRNA aligners. For DNA alignment, this release gives almost
+identical output to v2.0. Other changes include:
+
+ * Added option `-R` to set the read group header line in SAM.
+
+ * Optionally output the `cs:Z` tag in PAF to encode both the query and the
+   reference sequences in the alignment.
+
+ * Fixed an issue where DP alignment uses excessive memory.
+
+The minimap2 technical report has been updated with more details and the
+evaluation of spliced alignment:
+
+ * Li, H. (2017). Minimap2: fast pairwise alignment for long nucleotide
+   sequences. [arXiv:1708.01492v2](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01492v2).
+
+(2.1: 25 August 2017, r311)
+
+
+
 Release 2.0-r275 (8 August 2017)
 --------------------------------
 
diff --git a/main.c b/main.c
index b0405206..7199a070 100644
--- a/main.c
+++ b/main.c
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 #include "minimap.h"
 #include "mmpriv.h"
 
-#define MM_VERSION "2.0-r309-dirty"
+#define MM_VERSION "2.1-r311"
 
 void liftrlimit()
 {
diff --git a/minimap2.1 b/minimap2.1
index d5535c08..61a0bdb5 100644
--- a/minimap2.1
+++ b/minimap2.1
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-.TH minimap2 1 "25 August 2017" "minimap2-2.0-r309-dirty" "Bioinformatics tools"
+.TH minimap2 1 "25 August 2017" "minimap2-2.1-r311" "Bioinformatics tools"
 .SH NAME
 .PP
 minimap2 - mapping and alignment between collections of DNA sequences