Telomere-to-telomere genome assembly of the wood tiger moth Arctia plantaginis.

Abstract

The wood tiger moth, Arctia plantaginis, is an important model organism for the study of polymorphism in warning colour. One major colour locus has been identified, but studying its association with other traits as well as signatures of selection has been limited by the lack of a contiguous reference genome. A previous assembly consisted of more than 1000 scaffolds. Here, we present the first chromosome level genome assembly based on PacBio-HiFi data and linkage map information. The final assembly spans 589 Mb consisting of 31 telomere-to-telomere chromosomes with a N50 scaffold length of 21.2 MB. The BUSCO analysis (n = 5,760) indicated a high completeness of 98.1% with 97.5% present as single copy and 0.6% as duplicated. 17,456 genes were identified and 42.18% of the genome was classified as repetitive. This new assembly provides an important resource for future research using genomic tools for studying the genetic basis and evolutionary mechanisms underlying colour polymorphisms in this species.