The Complete Genome Sequences of 38 Species of Elephantfishes (Mormyridae, Osteoglossiformes)

Introduction

The Mormyridae are a family of weakly electric freshwater fish found over most of Africa, with the exception of the Sahara, northernmost Mahgreb and southernmost Cape provinces. They are an important food source in Africa’s inland regions where they are often the most abundant fish available (Sullivan and Lavoué 2022).

Elephantfishes possess organs that generate weak electric fields, and electroreceptors that can sense nearby objects and prey as distortions to their self-produced detect the electric fields generated by prey in low visibility conditions (Carlson et al. 2019).

We present the complete genome sequences of 38 species of elephantfishes from 20 genera. Tissue samples were obtained from preserved museum specimens.

Methods

DNA extraction was performed using the Qiagen DNAeasy genomic extraction kit using the standard process. 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.

Discussion

These published data have already been used in recent publications on mormyrid phylogenomics and taxonomy (Peterson et al. 2022; Sullivan et al. 2022) and will serve a resource for future studies of this group of fishes.

Funding

Funding was provided by Iridian Genomes, grant# IRGEN_RG_2021-1345 Genomic Studies of Eukaryotic Taxa.