The yellow drum (Nibea albiflora) is an economically important sciaenid fish in East Asian countries. In this study, we sequenced and assembled a near-complete gynogenetic yellow drum genome. We generated 45.63 Gb of Illumina short-reads and 80.27 Gb of PacBio long-reads and assembled them into a 628.01-Mb genome with a contig N50 of 4.42 Mb. Twenty-four chromosomes with a scaffold N50 of 26.73 Mb were obtained using the Hi-C analysis. We predicted a set of 27,069 protein-coding genes, of which 1,581 and 2,583 were expanded and contracted gene families, respectively. The most expanded genes were categorised into the protein binding, zinc-ion binding and ATP binding functional pathways. We built a high-density genetic linkage map that spanned 4,300.2 cM with 24 linkage groups and a resolution of 0.69 cM. The high-quality reference genome and annotated profiles that we produced will not only increase our understanding of the genetic architecture of economic traits in the yellow drum, but also help us explore the evolution and unique biological characteristics of sciaenid fishes.
© 2021. The Author(s).