The telomere-to-telomere gapless genome assembly of the spotted sea bass, <i>Lateolabrax maculatus</i>

The spotted sea bass (<i>Lateolabrax maculatus</i>) is one of the most important commercial marine fish species in Asia, known for its high nutritional value. With the development of sequencing technology, genome analysis has raised higher requirements for the continuity completeness and correctnessof the previously published reference genome. In this study, we present a gapless assembly of <i>L. maculatus</i> with a genome size of 632.75 Mb. More than 99% (626.61 Mb) of the sequences assembled onto the 24 chromosomes, and telomeres were identified on 34 ends. Merqury analysis showed that the average consensus quality value (QV) of this genome was 54, indicating a high level of accuracy. The alignment of PacBio HiFi and ONT ultra-long sequencing data with the genome using minimap2 resulted in a mapping rate exceeding 99.9%. And we detected 20.90% (132.25 Mb) of repeat sequences and predicted 22,014 protein-coding genes. The findings of this study serve as a significant foundation for investigating the evolution of the spotted sea bass genome and developing molecular breeding techniques.