A high-coverage draft genome of the mycalesine butterfly Bicyclus anynana.

Reuben W Nowell,Christopher W Wheat,Antónia Monteiro,Heidi Connahs,Sujai Kumar,Ben Elsworth,Mark Blaxter,Muhammad L Aslam,Vicencio Oostra,Bas J Zwaan,Arjen E Van’T Hof,Paul M Brakefield,Marjo Saastamoinen,Bethany R Wasik,Richard J Challis,Ilik J Saccheri

doi:10.1093/gigascience/gix035

Abstract

The mycalesine butterfly Bicyclus anynana, the “Squinting bush brown,” is a model organism in the study of lepidopteran ecology, development, and evolution. Here, we present a draft genome sequence for B. anynana to serve as a genomics resource for current and future studies of this important model species. Seven libraries with insert sizes ranging from 350 bp to 20 kb were constructed using DNA from an inbred female and sequenced using both Illumina and PacBio technology; 128 Gb of raw Illumina data was filtered to 124 Gb and assembled to a final size of 475 Mb (∼×260 assembly coverage). Contigs were scaffolded using mate-pair, transcriptome, and PacBio data into 10 800 sequences with an N50 of 638 kb (longest scaffold 5 Mb). The genome is comprised of 26% repetitive elements and encodes a total of 22 642 predicted protein-coding genes. Recovery of a BUSCO set of core metazoan genes was almost complete (98%). Overall, these metrics compare well with other recently published lepidopteran genomes. We report a high-quality draft genome sequence for Bicyclus anynana. The genome assembly and annotated gene models are available at LepBase (http://ensembl.lepbase.org/index.html).

Highlights

The mycalesine butterfly Bicyclus anynana, the ‘Squinting bush brown’, is a model organism in the study of lepidopteran ecology, development and evolution
128 Gb raw Illumina data were filtered to 124 Gb and assembled to a final size of 475 Mb (~260X assembly coverage)
The genome assembly and annotated gene models are available at LepBase

Summary

Introduction

The mycalesine butterfly Bicyclus anynana, the ‘Squinting bush brown’, is a model organism in the study of lepidopteran ecology, development and evolution. The genome assembly and annotated gene models are available at LepBase (http://ensembl.lepbase.org/index.html). DNA from a female descendent of the same inbred line was used to construct two long read libraries with insert sizes of 10 and 20 kb, sequenced on the PacBio platform at the Genome Institute of Singapore at 20x coverage using 16 P6 SMRT cells.

Results

Conclusion