Genome assembly of the deep-sea coral Lophelia pertusa

• Published in: Gigabyte
• Main Authors: Santiago Herrera, Erik E. Cordes
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: GigaScience Press 2023
• Subjects: Electronic computers. Computer science; QA75.5-76.95; Lophelia pertusa
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.78; https://doaj.org/article/d76e43a744da464c9e7aa7741c4c6c76

Like their shallow-water counterparts, cold-water corals create reefs that support highly diverse communities, and these structures are subject to numerous anthropogenic threats. Here, we present the genome assembly of Lophelia pertusa from the southeastern coast of the USA, the first one for a deep-sea scleractinian coral species. We generated PacBio continuous long reads data for an initial assembly and proximity ligation data for scaffolding. The assembly was annotated using evidence from transcripts, proteins, and ab initio gene model predictions. This assembly is comparable to high-quality reference genomes from shallow-water scleractinian corals. The assembly comprises 2,858 scaffolds (N50 1.6 Mbp) and has a size of 556.9 Mbp. Approximately 57% of the genome comprises repetitive elements and 34% of coding DNA. We predicted 41,089 genes, including 91.1% of complete metazoan orthologs. This assembly will facilitate investigations into the ecology of this species and the evolution of deep-sea corals.