Aedes albopictus AalbF3 Genome Assembly. Aedes albopictus isolate:FPA

We constructed a high-density linkage map for Ae. albopictus based on 111,328 informative SNPs obtained by RNAseq. The RNAseq reads used for the linkage map are available under BioProject PRJNA694122. We then used the linkage map to perform a linkage-map anchored reassembly of AalbF2, the genome assembly produced by Palatini et al. (2020). No new genomic sequencing was performed as part of this project. Our reassembled genome sequence, AalbF3, represents several improvements relative to AalbF2. First, the size of the AalbF3 assembly is 1.45 Gb, which closely matches cytoflourometric estimate of the genome size of Ae. albopictus and is almost half the size of AalbF2. Furthermore, relative to AalbF2, AalbF3 contains a higher proportion of complete and single-copy BUSCO genes (84.3%) and a higher proportion of aligned RNAseq reads map concordantly to a single location of the genome (46%).