Elephas maximus indicus (Indian elephant) genome, mEleMax1

The Indian elephant is one of the three subspecies of the Asian Elephant. It has been classified as Endangered on the IUCN realist since 1986 due to habitat loss and environmental degradation mainly caused by human activities. This is the primary assembly of the mEleMax1. This assembly has been produced as part of the VGP Project, and supported by Virpi Lummaa (Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, university of Turku, Finland), Camila Mazzoni (group leader at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany), and by Colossal Biosciences. Work was done in collaboration with Sara Ord, Eriona Hysolli, and Larissa Souza Arantes. Skin tissue was collected from a 50 years old adult male at the San Diego zoo, California (SB-218, and GAN # 26734787; ZIMS/Species 360) and fibroblast cells were cultured by the San Diego Frozen Zoo. The sample was sequenced using the VGP 2.0 individual pipeline at the Rockefeller University Vertebrate Genome Lab, led by Olivier Fedrigo and Erich Jarvis. The primary haplotype contigs were generated from PacBio Hifi reads, scaffolded with Bionano optical maps, and Arima HiC reads. The genome was assembled by Diego De Panis. Manual curation of chromosomes and other genomic features was conducted by Nadolina Brajuka and led by Giulio Formenti.