Molothrus ater Genome sequencing and assembly

Molothrus ater 1.0 (brown headed cowbird) Sequence Assembly Release NotesBackground:The brown headed cowbird (family Icteridae) is an obligate brood parasitic songbird whose range spans much of North America. Cowbird DNA isolated for whole genome sequencing is derived from an adult female (bird identifier: BHLD 08-10-18) within the laboratory of Dr. Wes Warren. The specimen is from a female cowbird nestling that was taken from a prothonotary warbler (Protonotaria citrea) nest in Belknap, Illinois, and then hand reared in captivity. High molecular weight DNA was used as input to generate long reads on the Sequel II instrument (PacBio) according to the manufacturer's protocols. Total sequence coverage was 200x using a genome size estimate of 1.1 Gb. All quality filtered sequence reads were assembled using Canu using default parameter settings. The assembly is made up of a total of 447 scaffolds (including 359 single contig scaffolds) with an N50 scaffold length of 52.1 Mb (N=7). The N50 contig length was 9.7 Mb (N=36) and the assembly spans 1.08 Gb.This work was supported by NSF grants DBI 1754311, 1754397, 1754406, 1754643, 1940624.Molothrus ater 1.0 Sequence and Assembly Credits:DNA source: Dr. Mark Hauber, University of Illinois at Urbana ChampaignGenome Sequence: Hudson Alpha Institute, Huntsville, ALSequence Assembly: University of Missouri, Columbia, MOCitation upon use of this assembly in a manuscript:It is requested that users of this Molothrus ater 1.0 sequence assembly acknowledge the Brood Parasitic Bird Genomes Consortium in any publications that result from use of this sequence assembly prior to the publication of this resource. Any publications that propose to generate whole genome analyses using this resource should contact Dr. Michael Sorenson ([e-mail]) or Chris Balakrishnan ([e-mail]) for the use of pre-publication data in accord with the Ft. Lauderdale and Toronto genomic data use agreements.