Spilogale interrupta Genome sequencing and assembly. Spilogale interrupta

Spilogale interrupta is one of 4 newly-recognized species of spotted skunks in the United States. The taxonomy of spotted skunks is currently under revision with new analyses of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA suggesting a rapid speciation and expansion of these small carnivores. This genome assembly was generated from an ear punch collected from a male S. interrupta live- captured near Polo, South Dakota in April 2019, by Merav Ben-David, Robert Riotto, and Zachariah Bell from the University of Wyoming, and Samantha Fino from South Dakota State University (under permit SD_DGFP 35). High molecular-weight genomics DNA was extracted from the ear punch using Circulomics Nanobind Tissue Big DNA kit by Maggie Weitzman from the University of Oregon GC3F. PacBio sequencing library was prepped at 2x reaction scale with SMRTbell Express Template Prep Kit 2.0, using PacBio's CLR library preparation protocol. The CLR library was sequenced across 16 individual SMRT Cells during June 2019. The output was merged into a single file by Douglas Turnbull from the University of Oregon GC3F. A draft genome was assembled using the Flye assembly program yielding contig N50 of 16.7 MB and scaffold N50 17.9 MB. The completeness of the assembly was evaluated with BUSCO version 3.0.2 with the lineage dataset "mammalia_odb9" and genome mode. Results indicated 0.96 complete (single 0.95, duplicated 0.01), 0.02 fragmented, and 0.02 missing of 4104. Post assembly-processing was conducted by Vikram Chhatre and Zachariah Bell from the University of Wyoming and Braden Godwin from Sheridan College at Gillette. The genome assembly is soft masked and contains 2,406,579,333 base pairs (bp) with 0.2919 A, 0.2081 C, 0.2080 G, and 0.2920 T. Correctness of the genome was assessed by comparing alignment success of 211 spotted skunk samples to this and an equivalent 2,473,929,350 bp genome of Spilogale gracilis.