Chromosome-level genome assembly of the viviparous eelpout Zoarces viviparus.

The viviparous eelpout Zoarces viviparus is a common fish across the North-East Atlantic and has successfully colonized habitats across environmental gradients. Due to its wide distribution and predictable phenotypic responses to pollution, Z. viviparus is used as bioindicator organism and has been routinely sampled over decades by several countries to monitor marine environmental health. Additionally, this species is a promising model to study adaptive processes related to environmental change, specifically global warming. Here, we report the chromosome-level genome assembly of Z. viviparus, which has a size of 663 mega base pairs (mbp) and consists of 607 scaffolds (N50 = 26 mbp). The 24 largest represent the 24 chromosomes of the haploid Z. viviparus genome, which harbors 98% of the complete BUSCOs defined for ray-finned fish, indicating that the assembly is highly contiguous and complete. Comparative analyses between the Z. viviparus assembly and chromosome-level genomes of two other eelpout species revealed a high synteny, but also an accumulation of repetitive elements in the Z. viviparus genome. Our reference genome will be an important resource enabling future in-depth genomic analyses of the effects of environmental change in this important bioindicator species.

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© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.