Introduction
Birds in the Fringillidae family are true finches. There are three subfamilies, Fringillinae, Euphoniinae and Carduelinae (Zuccon et al. 2012). They are small to medium-sized, widespread, largely granivorous birds and are native to every continent except Antarctica and Australia. They also have colonized and differentiated on oceanic islands. They often have stout, conical-shaped bills (except Hawaiian honeycreepers) (Winkler, Billerman, and Lovette 2015). Some of European origin have been introduced to Australia and New Zealand. There are also introduced populations across the world, including in the United States and Argentina, where they share geography with native finches (North and South American siskins, redpolls, rosefinches etc.). Several species are common caged birds and historically have been kept as pets (e.g. European Goldfinches) or for human services (e.g. Canaries to detect carbon monoxide in coal mines).
Methods
Tissues single, wild-collected individuals were used for this study. DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNEasy genomic extraction kit using the standard process. Paired-end sequencing libraries were constructed using the Illumina TruSeq kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The libraries were sequenced on an Illumina Hi-Seq platform in paired-end, 2 × 150bp format. The resulting fastq files were trimmed of adapter/primer sequences and low-quality regions with Trimmomatic v0.33 (Bolger, Lohse, and Usadel 2014). The trimmed sequence was assembled by SPAdes v3.15.4 (Bankevich et al. 2012) followed by a finishing step using Zanfona (Kieras, O’Neill, and Pirro 2021).
Results and Data Availability
All raw read data and assembled genomes are available on Genbank:
Funding
Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345 "Genomic Studies of Eukaryotic Taxa.