Draft genome of the Northern snakehead, Channa argus.

Jian Xu,Chao Bian,Qiong Shi,Hua Deng,Yu Huang,Hanyuan Zhang,Kunci Chen,Jia Li,Yunhai Yi,Songhao Zhang,Chuanju Dong,Peng Xu,Wenzhu Peng,Yanliang Jiang,Xinxin You,Guiming Liu,Qing Luo

doi:10.1093/gigascience/gix011

Abstract

Background: The Northern snakehead (Channa argus), a member of the Channidae family of the Perciformes, is an economically important freshwater fish native to East Asia. In North America, it has become notorious as an intentionally released invasive species. Its ability to breathe air with gills and migrate short distances over land makes it a good model for bimodal breath research. Therefore, recent research has focused on the identification of relevant candidate genes. Here, we performed whole genome sequencing of C. argus to construct its draft genome, aiming to offer useful information for further functional studies and identification of target genes related to its unusual facultative air breathing. Findings: We assembled the C. argus genome with a total of 140.3 Gb of raw reads, which were sequenced using the Illumina HiSeq2000 platform. The final draft genome assembly was approximately 615.3 Mb, with a contig N50 of 81.4 kb and scaffold N50 of 4.5 Mb. The identified repeat sequences account for 18.9% of the whole genome. The 19 877 protein-coding genes were predicted from the genome assembly, with an average of 10.5 exons per gene. Conclusion: We generated a high-quality draft genome of C. argus, which will provide a valuable genetic resource for further biomedical investigations of this economically important teleost fish.

Highlights

Introduction ofC. argusThe Northern snakehead (Channa argus) is a special snakehead fish mainly cultivated in Asia and Africa for food, especially in China with an annual production of about510,000 tons
Our results demonstrated that the generated genome assembly covered 242 of the 248 Core Eukaryotic Gene (CEG) sequences, suggesting a high level of completeness within the genome assembly
We report the first whole genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation of the Northern snakehead (Channa argus)

Summary

Introduction

Introduction ofC. argusThe Northern snakehead (Channa argus) is a special snakehead fish mainly cultivated in Asia and Africa for food, especially in China with an annual production of about510,000 tons (worth ~1.6 billion US dollars). The genome sequence of C. argus has not been reported yet, and in our current study we performed genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation of this teleost species. C. argus genome sequencing on the Illumina platform Paired-end sequencing with 2 x 100-bp read length was performed on the short-insert and long-insert libraries by the Illumina After removal of low-quality and redundant reads, we obtained about 138.2 Gb of clean data for further de novo assembling of the C. argus genome.

Results

Conclusion