Genome of an iconic Australian bird: High-quality assembly and linkage map of the superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus)

The superb fairy-wren, Malurus cyaneus, is one of the most iconic Australian passerine species. This species belongs to an endemic Australasian clade, Meliphagides, which diversified early in the evolution of the oscine passerines. Today, the oscine passer- ines comprise almost half of all avian species diversity. Despite the rapid increase of available bird genome assemblies, this part of the avian tree has not yet been repre- sented by a high-quality reference. To rectify that, we present the first high-quality genome assembly of a Meliphagides representative: the superb fairy-wren. We com- bined Illumina shotgun and mate-pair sequences, PacBio long-reads, and a genetic linkage map from an intensively sampled pedigree of a wild population to gener- ate this genome assembly. Of the final assembled 1.07-Gb genome, 975 Mb (90.4%) was anchored onto 25 pseudochromosomes resulting in a final superscaffold N50 of 68.11 Mb. This high-quality bird genome assembly is one of only a handful which...