A high-quality draft meta genome assembly of the Neotropical butterfly, Batesia hypochlora (Nymphalidae: Biblidinae)

We report a long-read high-coverage reference genome assembly of the Neotropical painted beauty butterfly, Batesia hypochlora (Nymphalidae: Biblidinae). This represents the first reference genome in the Biblidinae subfamily, a clade subject to ongoing studies on seasonal and climate adaptation in the Amazon. We assembled the genome from PacBio HiFi long reads (66X coverage), polished it with Illumina short reads (15X coverage), and annotated it using PacBio IsoSeq RNA data. The high quality of our long-read sequencing also allowed us to assemble both the mitochondrial genome and the genome of the Wolbachia bacterial symbiont associated with B. hypochlora. We observed 15 chromosome-sized scaffolds varying in length from 13.2 Mbp to 37.6 Mbp (median 24.3 Mbp), combining a total genome size of 395.788 Mbp. This assembly is highly contiguous (contig N50 of 25.14 Mbp) and complete (BUSCO completeness score of 98.6%). Repeat annotation revealed that the genome consists of one-third transposable elements (TE). Gene prediction using RNAseq evidence uncovers 19,395 genes, of which 17,400 were assigned to 2,883 orthogroups when including genomes of a fly, a silk moth, and three other Nymphalidae butterflies. We also assembled the mitochondrial genome (size 15,540 bp long) and the genome of the common endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia, belonging to the B-supergroup. The high-quality assembly of B. hypochlora can represent the subfamily in further comparative analysis of evolution and provide a key resource for ongoing work to explore reproductive biology and adaptations to seasonality in Amazonian butterflies