Evolution of hybridogenetic lineages in Cataglyphis ants - Draft genome of Cataglyphis hispanica 'his1'

Several species of <i>Cataglyphis</i> desert ants have evolved a peculiar breeding system called social hybridogenesis. Under this system, two divergent genetic lineages coexist within a species. Workers develop from hybrid crosses between lineages, whereas queens and males are produced by parthenogenesis and carry only the maternal genome. To gain a better understanding of the evolutionary history of social hybridogenesis in <i>Cataglyphis</i>, we studied its phylogeographic distribution in the Iberian Peninsula using both SNP nuclear markers.<br><i>C. hispanica </i>was used as an outgroup and reference for analyses. The genome of a <i>C. hispanica</i> queen was sequenced on a HiSeq 2000 (PE100; ~42x genome-wide depth). The short-read library was assembled into a draft genome using SPAdes v3.13 (Bankevich et al. 2012). BUSCO analysis (Simão et al. 2015) revealed that 79% of the single-copy orthologs specific to Hymenoptera were complete in the assembly.