High quality assembly and transcriptome of the European barn owl (Tyto alba alba).

A high quality genome assembly of the European barn owl (Tyto alba alba) of 1.219 Gbp was assembled by mixing Illumina (117 x) and Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) long reads (12 x) technologies. BUSCO (Universal Single-Copy Orthologs) analysis revealed a high assembly completeness with only 1.8 % of the genes missing out of 4'915 avian orthologs searched and thus the European barn owl genome assembly appeared to be as good as the genomes of the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) or the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis). By mapping the reads of the female American barn owl (Tyto furcata pratincola) to the male European barn owl reads, several structural variants are detected and 70 Mbp of the Z chromosome is identified. The scaffold belonging to the Z chromosomes is further confirmed by mapping the European barn owl genome to the chromosomes of zebra finch. The completeness of the European barn owl genome is further demonstrated with a set of 128 proteins missing in the chicken genome, out of which 122 (95.3 %) were retrieved in the European barn owl transcripts and out of them reciprocal alignment recovered 94 input proteins (72.9 %). High quality genome is of key importance for future population genomics and comparative avian studies. This is exemplified by the finding that the barn owl position in the avian tree of life differs when the European or the American assembly is used.