Supporting data for "Chromosomal-level assembly of yellow catfish genome using third-generation DNA sequencing and Hi-C analysis"

The yellow catfish, Pelteobagrus fulvidraco, belonging to Siluriformes order, is an important economic freshwater aquaculture fish species in Asia, especially in south China. Recently, the aquaculture industry is facing tremendous challenges in germplasm degeneration and poor diseases resistance. Meanwhile, yellow catfish exhibits notable sex dimorphism on growth rate that adult males are about two to three fold bigger than females. How aquaculture industry takes advantage of such sex dimorphism is another challenge. To address these challenges, a high-quality reference genome of the yellow catfish is needed. To construct a high-quality reference genome for yellow catfish, we generated 51.2 Gb short reads and 38.9 Gb long reads using Illumina and PacBio platforms, respectively. The sequencing data were assembled into 732.8 Mb genome assembly with contig N50 length of 1.1 Mb. Additionally, we applied Hi-C technology to identify contacts among contigs, which were then used to assemble contigs into scaffolds, resulting in a genome assembly with 26 chromosomes, and a scaffold N50 length of 25.8 Mb. Using 24,552 protein-coding genes annotated in yellow catfish genome, the phylogenetic relationships of the yellow catfish with other teleosts showed that yellow catfish separated from the common ancestor of channel catfish ~81.9 million years ago. 1,717 gene families were identified to be expanded in yellow catfish and those gene families are mainly enriched in immune system, signal transduction, glycosphingolipid biosynthesis and fatty acid biosynthesis. Taking advantage of Illumina, PacBio and Hi-C technologies, we constructed the first high-quality chromosomal-level genome assembly for the yellow catfish P. fulvidraco. The genomic resources generated in this work not only offered valuable reference genome for functional genomics studies of yellow catfish to decipher the economic traits and sex determination, but also provided important chromosome information for genome comparisons in broad evolutionary research community.