De Novo Assembly of the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) Genome Reveals Candidate Regulatory Regions for Sexually Dichromatic Red Plumage Coloration.

ABSTRACT: Northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) are common, mid-sized passerines widely distributed in North America. As an iconic species with strong sexual dichromatism, it has been the focus of extensive ecological and evolutionary research, yet genomic studies investigating the evolution of genotype-phenotype association of plumage coloration and dichromatism are lacking. Here we present a new, highly-contiguous assembly for C. cardinalis We generated a 1.1 Gb assembly comprised of 4,762 scaffolds, with a scaffold N50 of 3.6 Mb, a contig N50 of 114.4 kb and a longest scaffold of 19.7 Mb. We identified 93.5% complete and single-copy orthologs from an Aves dataset using BUSCO, demonstrating high completeness of the genome assembly. We annotated the genomic region comprising the

SUBMITTER: Sin SYW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7534441 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature