The killi fish Nothobranchius furzeri is a new vertebrate model organism in age research. We present a high-quality draft genome assembly of the inbred GRZ strain. The study includes Illumina, Roche and PacBio sequencing data.
The basic genome assembly was performed with ALLPATHS-LG based on sequence data of two female GRZ specimens, i.e. using >50-fold 170 bp paired-end Illumina reads from "fish 31" as well as >50-fold mate pair Illumina reads from "fish 55". The contiguity of this initial assembly was further increased by (i) using an in-house scaffolding pipeline ("KILAPE") and 8 kb and 20 kb mate pair reads from Roche technology (fish 1 & 3, which are two male specimens), (ii) integrating optical mapping data of a de novo whole genome optical map provided by OpGen (primary fibroblast cells of a female GRZ), (iii) integrating genetic maps of N. furzeri and (iv) employing synteny comparison to the genomes of Medaka and Stickleback. This resulted in a final assembly of 1.24 Gb (N50: 57 Mb) of which 87% (1.08 Gb, N50: 64 Mb) were assigned to 19 putative chromosomes while 5,877 scaffolds remain unassigned (164 Mb, N50: 82 kb).
This study further includes PacBio WGS sequences of one male GRZ individual (M013) and the following Illumina NGS data: WGS sequencing of four N. furzeri strains (GRZ, MZM-0403, MZM-0410, and MZZW-0701), pooled sequencing of 96 barcoded BACs (of a BAC library of male GRZ), RNA sequencing data of different tissues of six N. furzeri strains at different ages (GRZ, MZM-0403, MZM-0410, MZM-0703, MZCS-08122, and MZZW-0701) and RNA sequencing data of four additional Nothobranchius and a further fish species (N. kadleci, N. korthausae, N. kuhntae, N. pienaari, and Aphyosemion striatum).
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