Introduction
African characiform fishes are represented by 128 species distributed in the clade Alestoidea with the families Alestidae, Hepsetidae, and Lepidarchidae (Melo and Stiassny 2024). Although much of the recent research is centered on their phylogenetics and phenotypic evolution (Melo and Stiassny 2022; Stiassny et al. 2023), only one Hepsetus genome is available (Yang et al. 2023). Here we release 20 new assembled genomes of African characiforms that will provide a foundation for further comparative genomic studies.
Methods
Single wild-collected and aquarium individuals were sampled for this study. Tissues were obtained from the Department of Ichthyology of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue extraction kit using the standard protocol. A paired-end sequencing library was constructed using the Illumina TruSeq kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The library was sequenced on an Illumina Hi-Seq platform in paired-end, 2 × 150 bp format. The resulting fastq files were trimmed of adapter/primer sequence and low-quality regions with Trimmomatic v0.33 (Bolger, Lohse, and Usadel 2014). The trimmed sequence was assembled by SPAdes v2.5 (Bankevich et al. 2012) followed by a finishing step using Zanfona (Kieras, O’Neill, and Pirro 2021).
Results and Data Availability
All data, including raw reads and assembled genome sequence, is available via GenBank.
Funding
Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes, grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345 Genomic Studies of Eukaryotic Taxa, and the AMNH Axelrod Research Curatorship.