Abstract
The Caucasian dwarf goby Knipowitschia cf. caucasica is a new invasive alien Gobiidae spreading in the Lower Rhine since 2019. Little is known about the invasion biology of the species and further investigations to reconstruct the invasion history are lacking genomic resources. We assembled a high-quality chromosome-scale reference genome of Knipowitschia cf. caucasica by combining PacBio, Omni-C and Illumina technologies. The size of the assembled genome is 956.58 Mb with a N50 scaffold length of 43 Mb, which includes 92.3 % complete Actinopterygii Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs. 98.96 % of the assembly sequence was assigned to 23 chromosome-level scaffolds, with a GC-content of 42.83 %. Repetitive elements account for 53.08 % of the genome. The chromosome-level genome contained 26,404 transcripts with 23,210 multi-exons, of which 26,260 genes were functionally annotated. In summary, the high-quality genome assembly provides a fundamental basis to understand the adaptive advantage of the species.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Chromosome-scale collinearity analysis between Knipowitschia cf. caucasica and Mugilogobius chulae to assess genome scaffolding quality, detailed in Materials and Methods and Results. Protein hints from Mugilogobius chulae, Boleophthalmus pectinirostris, and Periophthalmus magnuspinnatus were included into the OrthdoDB v11 metazoan subclade and BRAKER3 was re-ran with RNA-Seq data and the protein database.
