Chromosome-level genome assembly and annotation of the sharpsnout seabream (Diplodus puntazzo).

Abstract

Diplodus puntazzo is a demersal fish inhabiting the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic and plays an important ecological role in coastal areas. Here, we present the first nuclear genome assembly and annotation of this species and genus. We used a combination of PacBio CLR long reads, Illumina short reads and chromatin capture reads (Omni-C) to generate a chromosome-level assembly. The nuclear genome assembly has a total span of 788 Mb, containing 24 chromosome-scale scaffolds (98.76% of the total length), coinciding with its known karyotype. By using RNA-Seq data from D. puntazzo and gene models from closely related species, we also generated a high-quality nuclear annotation. We predicted a total of 87,572 transcripts from the nuclear genome, 26,838 coding, and 60,734 non-coding that included lncRNA, snoRNA, and tRNAs. We also assembled and annotated the mitochondrial genome, circularized in 16,642 bp comprising 13 protein-coding genes, 2 rRNA, and 22 tRNA. This high-quality reference genome will enrich the current genomic resources available to the large fish scientific community.