The Genome of the North American Brown Bear or Grizzly: Ursus arctos ssp. horribilis

• Published in: Genes
• Main Authors: Taylor, Gregory A., Kirk, Heather, Coombe, Lauren, Jackman, Shaun D., Chu, Justin, Tse, Kane, Cheng, Dean, Chuah, Eric, Pandoh, Pawan, Carlsen, Rebecca, Zhao, Yongjun, Mungall, Andrew J., Moore, Richard, Birol, Inanc, Franke, Maria, Marra, Marco A., Dutton, Christopher, Jones, Steven J. M.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2018
• Subjects: Article; Ursus arctos
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6315469/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30513700; https://doi.org/10.3390/genes9120598

The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos ssp. horribilis) represents the largest population of brown bears in North America. Its genome was sequenced using a microfluidic partitioning library construction technique, and these data were supplemented with sequencing from a nanopore-based long read platform. The final assembly was 2.33 Gb with a scaffold N50 of 36.7 Mb, and the genome is of comparable size to that of its close relative the polar bear (2.30 Gb). An analysis using 4104 highly conserved mammalian genes indicated that 96.1% were found to be complete within the assembly. An automated annotation of the genome identified 19,848 protein coding genes. Our study shows that the combination of the two sequencing modalities that we used is sufficient for the construction of highly contiguous reference quality mammalian genomes. The assembled genome sequence and the supporting raw sequence reads are available from the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) under the bioproject identifier PRJNA493656, and the assembly described in this paper is version QXTK01000000.