Yury V Bukhman, Phillip A Morin, Susanne Meyer, Li-Fang Chu, Jeff K Jacobsen, Jessica Antosiewicz-Bourget, Daniel Mamott, Maylie Gonzales, Cara Argus, Jennifer Bolin, Mark E Berres, Olivier Fedrigo, John Steill, Scott A Swanson, Peng Jiang, Arang Rhie, Giulio Formenti, Adam M Phillippy, Robert S Harris, Jonathan M D Wood, Kerstin Howe, Bogdan M Kirilenko, Chetan Munegowda, Michael Hiller, Aashish Jain, Daisuke Kihara, J Spencer Johnston, Alexander Ionkov, Kalpana Raja, Huishi Toh, Aimee Lang, Magnus Wolf, Erich D Jarvis, James A Thomson, Mark J P Chaisson, Ron Stewart
The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest animal known to have ever existed, making it an important case study in longevity and resistance to cancer. To further this and other blue whale-related research, we report a reference-quality, long-read-based genome assembly of this fascinating species. We assembled the genome from PacBio long reads and utilized Illumina/10X, optical maps, and Hi-C data for scaffolding, polishing, and manual curation. We also provided long read RNA-seq data to facilitate the annotation of the assembly by NCBI and Ensembl...
February 20, 2024: Molecular Biology and Evolution