Whole genome assemblies of Zophobas morio and Tenebrio molitor

Abstract

Zophobas morio (=Zophobas atratus) and Tenebrio molitor are darkling beetles with industrial importance due to their use as feeder insects and their apparent ability to biodegrade plastics. High quality genome assemblies were recently reported for both species. Here, we report additional independent Z. morio and T. molitor genome assemblies generated from Nanopore and Illumina data. Following scaffolding against the published genomes, haploid assemblies of 462 Mb (scaffold N90 of 16.8 Mb) and 258 Mb (scaffold N90 of 5.9 Mb) were produced for Z. morio and T. molitor, respectively. Gene prediction led to the prediction of 28,544 and 19,830 genes for Z. morio and T. molitor, respectively. Benchmarking Universal Single Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) analyses suggested that both assemblies have a high level of completeness; 91.5 and 89.0% of the BUSCO endopterygota marker genes were complete in the Z. morio assembly and proteome, respectively, while 99.1 and 92.8% were complete in the T. molitor assembly and proteome, respectively. Phylogenomic analyses of four genera from the family Tenebrionidae yielded phylogenies consistent with those previously constructed based on mitochondrial genomes. Synteny analyses revealed large stretches of macrosynteny across the family Tenebrionidae, as well as numerous within-chromosome rearrangements. Finally, orthogroup analysis identified ∼28,000 gene families across the family Tenebrionidae, of which 8,185 were identified in all five of the analyzed species, and 10,837 were conserved between Z. morio and T. molitor. We expect that the availability of multiple whole genome sequences for Z. morio and T. molitor will facilitate population genetics studies to identify genetic variation associated with industrially relevant phenotypes.

Keywords: Tenebrio molitor; Zophobas atratus; Zophobas morio; Tenebrionidae; darkling beetle; mealworm; superworm; whole genome sequence.