Genomics, Population Divergence, and Historical Demography of the World's Largest and Endangered Butterfly, The Queen Alexandra's Birdwing.

ABSTRACT: The world's largest butterfly is the microendemic Papua New Guinean Ornithoptera alexandrae. Despite years of conservation efforts to protect its habitat and breed this up-to-28-cm butterfly, this species still figures as endangered in the IUCN Red List and is only known from two allopatric populations occupying a total of only ∼140 km². Here we aim at assembling reference genomes for this species to investigate its genomic diversity, historical demography and determine whether the population is structured, which could provide guidance for conservation programs attempting to (inter)breed the two populations. Using a combination of long and short DNA reads and RNA sequencing, we assembled six reference genomes of the tribe Troidini, with four annotated genomes of O. alexandrae and two genom

SUBMITTER: Reboud EL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10101050 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature