Chromosome-level genome assembly of Nibea coibor using PacBio HiFi reads and Hi-C technologies

Nibea coibor belongs to Sciaenidae and is distributed in the South China Sea, East China Sea, India and the Philippines. In this study, we sequenced the DNA of a male Nibea coibor using PacBio long-read sequencing and generated chromatin interaction data. The genome size of Nibea coibor was estimated to be 611.85~633.88 Mb based on k-mer counts generated with Jellyfish. PacBio sequencing produced 29.26 Gb of HiFi reads, and Hifiasm was used to assemble a 627.60 Mb genome with a contig N50 of 10.66 Mb. We further found the canonical telomeric repeats "TTAGGG" to be present at the telomeres of all 24 chromosomes. The completeness of the assembly was estimated to be 98.9% and 97.8% using BUSCO and Merqury, respectively. Using the combination of ab initio prediction, protein homology and RNAseq annotation, we identified a total of 21,433 protein-coding genes. Phylogenetic analyses showed that Nibea coibor and Nibea albiflora are closely related. The results provide an important basis for research on the genetic breeding and genome evolution of Nibea coibor.