Improved chromosome-level genome assembly of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) integrating Pacific Biosciences long reads and a high-density linkage map.

Background: The Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) butterfly is a model system for metapopulation dynamics research in fragmented landscapes. Here, we provide a chromosome-level assembly of the butterfly's genome produced from Pacific Biosciences sequencing of a pool of males, combined with a linkage map from population crosses.

Results: The final assembly size of 484 Mb is an increase of 94 Mb on the previously published genome. Estimation of the completeness of the genome with BUSCO indicates that the genome contains 92-94% of the BUSCO genes in complete and single copies. We predicted 14,810 genes using the MAKER pipeline and manually curated 1,232 of these gene models.

Conclusions: The genome and its annotated gene models are a valuable resource for future comparative genomics, molecular biology, transcriptome, and genetics studies on this species.