Aquatica leii Genome sequencing and assembly

The fascinating flashing courtship signals of adult male and female fireflies are emitted by unique light organs developed at the end of their abdomen . In the larval firefly paired light organs form on the eighth abdominal segment, are usually seen from above and are emitted as a continuous glow until the larva is disturbed. Adult light organs, however, develop quite independently to larval light organs in the pupal stage, and the light is emitted in both sexes as a series of flashes of determined duration and interflash intervals. In the Luciolinae adult male light organs are on ventrites 6 and 7, in the female on ventrite 6 only Non functioning larval organs may be retained and are visible in the dissected abdomen behind the adult light organs in ventrite 7 for the first two days of the adult life. Keys to the development of adult light organs and firefly bioluminescence are expression of the luciferase gene and luciferase transportation to the reaction organelle of luminescent cells, the peroxisomes. Until now these aspects have not been well studied. We obtained high quality chromosome-level genome of the aquatic firefly Aquatica leii Fu & Ballantyne, total size 1.04 Gb, and Contig N50 of 10.8MB. With Hi-C technology, approximately 99.6% of the genome was assembled to 8 chromosomes, with a Scaffold N50 of 125.6 MB.