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

Several species of Cataglyphis 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 Cataglyphis, we studied its phylogeographic distribution in the Iberian Peninsula using both SNP nuclear markers.C. hispanica was used as an outgroup and reference for analyses. The genome of a C. hispanica 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.