A draft genome sequence of the common, or spectacled caiman Caiman crocodilus

Kenichi Okamoto,Elias Kinfu,Nichole Dopkins

doi:10.12688/f1000research.73066.1

Abstract

The common, or spectacled, caiman Caiman crocodilus is an abundant, widely distributed Neotropical crocodilian exhibiting notable morphological and molecular diversification. The species also accounts by far for the largest share of crocodilian hides on the global market, with the C. crocodilus hide trade alone valued at about US$86.5 million per year. We obtained 239,911,946 paired-end reads comprising approximately 72 G bases using IlluminaTM sequencing of tissue sampled from a single Caiman crocodilus individual. These reads were de-novo assembled and progressively aligned against the genomes of increasingly related crocodilians; liftoff was used to annotate the draft C. crocodilus genome assembly based on an Alligator mississipiensis (a confamilial species) annotation. The draft assembly has been submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information and both assembly and annotation are currently available for review at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4755063

Highlights

The common, or spectacled, caiman, Caiman crocodilus, is one of the most widely distributed and abundant crocodilian species, ranging continuously from Mexico to Argentina (Busack and Pandya 2001; US Fish and Wildlife Service 2018)
Within-species diversity is morphologically apparent, with skull shape in particular exhibiting systematic patterns of regional differentiation (Medem 1955; Gans 1980; Medem 1981, 1983; Ayarzaguena 1984; Escobedo-Galván et al 2015). These intraspecific patterns of cranial shape variation within C. crocodilus have been shown to parallel patterns of interspecific cranial diversity found in extant crocodilians (Okamoto et al 2015)
C. crocodilus is a species of commercial importance, in the leather industry

Summary

Introduction

The common, or spectacled, caiman, Caiman crocodilus, is one of the most widely distributed and abundant crocodilian species, ranging continuously from Mexico to Argentina (Busack and Pandya 2001; US Fish and Wildlife Service 2018). Keywords Caiman crocodilus, spectacled caiman, genome, assembly, nextgeneration sequencing, crocodilian, vertebrate genome Introduction The common, or spectacled, caiman, Caiman crocodilus, is one of the most widely distributed and abundant crocodilian species, ranging continuously from Mexico to Argentina (Busack and Pandya 2001; US Fish and Wildlife Service 2018).

Results

Conclusion