A chromosome-level genome assembly of the snow leopard, Panthera uncia

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia), a vulnerable big cat native to Central Asia, faces an ongoing population decline due to habitat loss and human activities. Despite its conservation importance, genomic resources for this species remain limited. High-quality reference genomes are essential for assessing genetic diversity, structural variation, and evolutionary history. To address this gap, we have generated a long-read-based and proximity-ligation scaffolded de novo genome assembly of a male snow leopard. The final assembly has a total length of 2.46 Gb in 280 scaffolds, of which the 19 largest correspond to the 18 autosomes and the X chromosome. The scaffold N50 is 145.76 Mb, and the L50 is seven scaffolds. BUSCO and compleasm scores are 98.7 % and 98.9 % of identified Carnivora orthologs. Telomeric sequences were identified on at least one end of 18 out of 19 chromosomes. Scaffolds corresponding to the Y chromosome were identified and mapped. Additionally, the assembly's annotation id..., , # A chromosome-level genome assembly of the snow leopard, Panthera uncia.

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dgv](10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dgv)

## Description of the data and file structure

The here presented dataset is the accompanying annotation results for a Genome report of the same title submitted published in the Journal of Heredity.

A de novo assembly for the snow leopard (*Panthera uncia*) was generated from PacBio HiFi reads using hifiasm v.0.19.7. The pseudohaploid assembly was then scaffolded using available Hi-C data from the DNAZoo ([www.dnazoo.org](http://www.dnazoo.org)) using the Arima Hi-C mapping pipeline used by the Vertebrate Genomes Project and YaHS v.1.1. Gaps in scaffolds were filled with TGS-GapCloser v.1.1.1 using the PacBio HiFi reads.

Repeats in the assembly were annotated using a de novo repeat library generated with RepeatModeler v.2.0.1 and a Felidae-specific repeat dataset from Dfam_3.1 and RepBase release 20181026 and masked using RepeatMasker v.4.1.0. In ...,