Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2023

A chromosome-level genome assembly for the Rock Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta)

Höfundar / Authors: Theodore E Squires (1,2), Patrik Rödin-Mörch (2), Giulio Formenti (3), Alan Tracey (4), Linelle Abueg (5), Nadolina Brajuka (5), Erich Jarvis (5), Eva C Halapi (1), Páll Melsted (6,7), Jacob Höglund (2), Kristinn Pétur Magnússon (2,6,7)

Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1.Faculty of Natural Resource Sciences, University of Akureyri, 2. Faculty of Animal Ecology, Centre for Evolution and Genomics, Uppsala University, 3. Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, The Rockefeller University, New York 4, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK, 5. Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, The Rockefeller University, New York, 6. Department of Computer Science, University of Iceland, University of Iceland Biomedical Center, 7. Icelandic Institute of Natural History, Iceland.

Kynnir / Presenter: Theodore E. Squires

The Rock Ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) is a cold-adapted, largely sedentary, game bird with a Holarctic distribution. The species represents an important example of an organism likely to be affected by ongoing climatic shifts across a disparate range. We provide here a high-quality reference genome and mitogenome for the Rock Ptarmigan assembled from PacBio HiFi and Hi-C sequencing of a female bird from Iceland. The total size of the genome is 1.03 Gb with a scaffold N50 of 71.23 Mb and a contig N50 of 17.91 Mb. The final scaffolds represent all 40 predicted chromosomes, and the mitochondria with a BUSCO score of 98.6%. Gene annotation resulted in 16,078 protein-coding genes out of a total 19,831 predicted (81.08% excluding pseudogenes). The genome included 21.07% repeat sequences, and the average length of genes, exons, and introns were 33605, 394, and 4265 bp, respectively. The availability of a new reference-quality genome will contribute to understanding the Rock Ptarmigan's unique evolutionary history, vulnerability to climate change, and demographic trajectories around the globe while serving as a benchmark for species in the family Phasianidae (order Galliformes).