Chromosome-level genome assembly and annotation of the tropical sea cucumber Holothuria fuscocinerea

By the integration of MGI short-read sequencing, PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing, and Hi-C techniques, we constructed a chromosome-scale genome assembly for Holothuria fuscocinerea, a highly abundant and widely distributed sea cucumber species in the family Holothuriidae. The assembly was anchored into 23 pseudochromosomes with a total size of 1.556 Gb after redundancy removal, demonstrating contig and scaffold N50 values of 5.18 Mb and 63.82 Mb, respectively, indicative of high contiguity. Genome quality assessment using Merqury and BUSCO analyses yielded a QV score of 60.4087 and a BUSCO completeness rate of 97.8%, confirming high assembly quality with minimal gaps. Among the 29,878 protein coding genes, 95 percent obtained functional annotations from at least one database. This high-resolution genome resource is expected to advance research on H. fuscocinerea and the Holothuroidea class, providing insights for population management, evolutionary studies, and genetics research.