Draft Genome Assembly of an Iconic Arctic Species: Muskox (Ovibos moschatus)

Muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus) are Arctic species within the Caprinae subfamily that are economically and culturally significant to northern Indigenous communities. Low genetic diversity from repeated genetic bottlenecks, coupled with the effects of Arctic warming (e.g., heat stress, changing forage, pathogen range expansions), present conservation concerns for this species. Reference genome assemblies enhance our ecological and evolutionary understanding of species (which in turn aid conservation efforts). Herein, we provide a full draft reference genome of muskox using Illumina Hiseq data and cross-species scaffolding. The final reference assembly yielded a genome of 2,621,890,883 bp in length, a scaffold N50 of ~13.2 million, and an annotation identifying ~19.3 k genes. The muskox genome assembly and annotation were then used to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree which estimated muskoxen diverged from other ungulate species~12 Mya. To gain insight into the demographic history of muskoxen we also performed pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC) that identified two population bottlenecks coinciding with major glaciation events contributing to the notoriously low genetic variation observed in muskoxen. Overall, this genome assembly provides a foundation for future population genomic studies, such as latitudinal analyses, to explore the capacity of muskoxen to adapt to rapidly changing environments.