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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.12.16.520814

A chromosome-scale high-contiguity genome assembly of the threatened cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)

Winter, S.·Meissner, R.·Greve, C.·Ben Hamadou, A.·Horin, P.·Prost, S.·Burger, P. A.
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Abstract

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus, SCHREBER 1775) is a large felid and is considered the fastest land animal. Historically, it inhabited open grassland across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwestern Asia; however, only small and fragmented populations remain today. Here, we present a de novo genome assembly of the cheetah based on PacBio continuous long reads and Hi-C proximity ligation data. The final assembly (VMU_Ajub_asm_v1.0) has a total length of 2.38 Gb, of which 99.7% are anchored into the expected 19 chromosome-scale scaffolds. The contig and scaffold N50 values of 96.8 Mb and 144.4 Mb, respectively, a BUSCO completeness of 95.4% and a k-mer completeness of 98.4%, emphasize the high quality of the assembly. Furthermore, annotation of the assembly identified 23,622 genes and a repeat content of 40.4%. This new highly contiguous and chromosome-scale assembly will greatly benefit conservation and evolutionary genomic analyses and will be a valuable resource, e.g., to gain a detailed understanding of the function and diversity of immune response genes in felids.

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Winter, S., Meissner, R., Greve, C., Ben Hamadou, A., Horin, P., Prost, S., Burger, P. A.. 2022-12-17. A chromosome-scale high-contiguity genome assembly of the threatened cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.16.520814

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