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Student 10-Minute Presentation

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

Student

Student Competition

Undergrad 10-min Competition: SysEB, General 1

Assembly and evaluation of the first reference genome of a webspinner insect, Aposthonia ceylonica

Monday, November 11, 2024
8:00 AM – 8:12 AM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 223, PCC
Oral Presentation Student Competition

Webspinner insects (Embioptera) evolved the ability to synthesize silk independently of all other arthropod lineages. Typically residing in subsocial colonies, they cooperatively construct galleries from silk spun from glands in their forelimbs. These provide camouflage from predators and cover from the rain. To date, we are unaware of any published embiopteran genomes. To fill this data gap, we sequenced and assembled a reference genome for the webspinner Aposthonia ceylonica. The genome of an individual male A. ceylonica was sequenced using PacBio HiFi sequencing. Assembly was completed with hifiasm and annotations were completed using the GALBA pipeline. Here we present a highly complete assembly of 3.078 Gbp across 620 contigs with a compleasm completeness score of 98.76%. The assembly is highly contiguous, with an L50 of 69 and a, N50 of 12.606 Mbp. Repetitive elements compose 69.46% of the genome. Gene annotation identified 49307 coding sequences. Four paralogous copies of the efibroin silk gene were located and manually annotated.