Abstract
The parasitoid wasp Muscidifurax raptorellus (Hymenoptera: Pteromalidae) is a gregarious species that has received extensive attention for its potential in biological pest control against house fly, stable fly, and other filth flies. It has a high reproductive capacity and can be reared easily. However, genome assembly is not available for M. raptorellus or any other species in this genus. Previously, we assembled a complete circular mitochondrial genome with a length of 24,717 bp. Here, we assembled and annotated a high-quality nuclear genome of M. raptorellus, using a combination of long-read (104× genome coverage) and short-read (326× genome coverage) sequencing technologies. The assembled genome size is 314 Mbp in 226 contigs, with a 97.9% BUSCO completeness score and a contig N50 of 4.67 Mb, suggesting excellent continuity of this assembly. Our assembly builds the foundation for comparative and evolutionary genomic analysis in the genus of Muscidifurax and possible future biocontrol applications.
Highlights
Muscidifurax (Hymenoptera: Pteromalidae) is a chalcid wasp genus with nine characterized species, all of which are pupal parasitoids
De novo genome assembly for the M. raptorellus Aub sample was performed by a Supernova 2.1.1 (Weisenfeld et al, 2017) assembler using 400 million reads subsampled from the total amount of reads generated from the 10× Genomics library
Two independent PacBio libraries were constructed for the assembly of M. raptorellus genome
Summary
Muscidifurax (Hymenoptera: Pteromalidae) is a chalcid wasp genus with nine characterized species, all of which are pupal parasitoids. Genome Assembly of Housefly Parasitoid mitochondrial gene sequence alignment in this genus, the most closely related sexual species to the asexual M. uniraptor is M. raptorellus (Taylor et al, 1997). Muscidifurax raptorellus (Chilean strain) is a gregarious parasitoid that typically produces 2–10 offspring per parasitized host pupa (Geden and Moon, 2009). Wasps in the genus Muscidifurax are of interest for comparative genomic studies, due to their close relationship to the model parasitoid genus Nasonia, which currently has genome assemblies for three species (Werren et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2020), with Muscidifurax estimated to be 15 million years divergent (Martinson et al, 2017a). The high-quality reference genome could inform and facilitate future genome manipulation in parasitoid wasps for more effective biological control strategies (Leung et al, 2020)
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