Abstract
Bees provide indispensable pollination services to both agricultural crops and wild plant populations, and several species of bees have become important models for the study of learning and memory, plant-insect interactions and social behavior. Orchid bees (Apidae: Euglossini) are especially important to the fields of pollination ecology, evolution, and species conservation. Here we report the nuclear and mitochondrial genome sequences of the orchid bee Euglossa dilemma. Euglossa dilemma was selected because it is widely distributed, highly abundant, and it was recently naturalized in the southeastern United States. We provide a high-quality assembly of the 3.3 giga-base genome, and an official gene set of 15,904 gene annotations. We find high conservation of gene synteny with the honey bee throughout 80 million years of divergence time. This genomic resource represents the first draft genome of the orchid bee genus Euglossa, and the first draft orchid bee mitochondrial genome, thus representing a valuable resource to the research community.
Data availability The E. dilemma genome assembly Edil_v1.0, the annotation, and the original gene set EdiI_0GS_v1.0 are available for download via NCBI [XXX], Beebase [XXX], the i5k NAL workspace [xxx], and the Ramirez Lab website [URL]. The raw reads are available at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive [XXX]. The published raw transcriptome sequence reads are available at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive [SRA: SRX765918].
