PSVIII-9 - Genome assembly of American mink (Neovison vison) using high-fidelity long reads

Development of genome-enabled selection and providing new insights in the genetic architecture of economically important traits are essential parts of mink breeding programs. Availability of a contagious genome assembly would guarantee the fundamental genomic studies in American mink (Neovison vison). Advances in long-read sequencing technologies have provided the opportunity to obtain high quality and free-gaps assemblies for different species. The objective of this study was to generate an accurate genome assembly using Single Molecule High-Fidelity (HiFi) Sequencing for American mink. The whole genome sequences of 100 mink were analyzed to select the most homozygous individual. A black American mink from Millbank Fur Farm (Rockwood, ON, Canada) was selected for PacBio sequencing. The total number of 2,884,047 HiFi reads with the average size of 20 kb were generated using three libraries of PacBio Sequel II System. Three de novo assemblers including wtdbg, Flye and IPA were used to obtain the initial draft of assembly using the long reads. The draft generated using Flye was selected as the final assembly based on the metrics of contiguity and completeness. The final assembly included 3,529 contigs with the N50 of 18.26 Mb and the largest contig of 62.16 Mb. The length of genome assembly was 2.66 Gb with 85 gaps. These results confirmed that high-coverage and accurate long-reads significantly improved the American mink genome assembly and successfully generated more contagious assembly. The chromosome conformation capture data will be integrated to the current draft to obtain a chromosome-level genome assembly for American mink at the next step of the project.