Tribolium castaneum isolate:GA-2 Genome sequencing. Tribolium castaneum isolate:GA-2

The genome of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, was sequenced more than ten years ago using Sanger sequencing of BAC and fosmid libraries of a highly inbred strain, GA2, and assembled using Atlas suite. The genome was significant as it was the first sequenced genome of a major agricultural pest and the first coleopteran species sequenced. However, despite its wide utility in functional genomics and integration into genetic models, the current assembly (Tcas5.2) lacks approximately 35% of the total base pairs of the 205 Mbp genome, and the sequence of the Y chromosome remains elusive, likely due to highly repetitive sequences. We therefore attempted to improve the assembly with additional high coverage (140x) long-read sequence from GA2 and long-range information from Hi-C data (218M read pairs of 2x151 bp, 210,294x coverage).