A chromosome-scale high-contiguity genome assembly of the threatened cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus, SCHREBER 1775) is a large felid and is
considered the fastest land animal. Historically, it inhabited open
grassland across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwestern Asia;
however, only small and fragmented populations remain today. Here, we
present a de novo genome assembly of the cheetah based on PacBio
continuous long reads and Hi-C proximity ligation data. The final assembly
(VMU_Ajub_asm_v1.0) has a total length of 2.38 Gb, of which 99.7% are
anchored into the expected 19 chromosome-scale scaffolds. The contig and
scaffold N50 values of 96.8 Mb and 144.4 Mb, respectively, a BUSCO
completeness of 95.4% and a k-mer completeness of 98.4%, emphasize the
high quality of the assembly. Furthermore, annotation of the assembly
identified 23,622 genes and a repeat content of 40.4%. This new highly
contiguous and chromosome-scale assembly will greatly benefit conservation
and evolutionary genomic analyses and will be a valuable resource, e.g.,
to gain a detailed understanding of the function and diversity of immune
response genes in felids.