Dryas iulia Genome sequencing

With the aim of studying functional and population genomics, over only the last five years, using a diverse variety of sequencing strategies (e.g. long reads, short reads at low and high coverage) a great volume of genomic data is regularly being sequenced for Heliconius butterflies. We aim to put together all available data and new genomic resources that will include new high-quality genomes, improvements to the available genomic data, and annotations of the combined genomic dataset using published and unpublished RNA resources, with a special focus on H. melpomene, in order to generate ortholog annotation tables for 58 Heliconiinii + 5 outgroup genomes. By doing so we show that the availability of a few well-annotated and assembled genomes provides the potential to exponentially make sense of the huge amount of data available. We also compare different sequencing strategies and technologies to show the weakness and strengths of each, and how to make good use of them. We hope this work will provide a powerful resource to explore the biology of the Heliconiini.