EBP-Nor makes public their first reference genome from the duck family – the common eider, Somateria mollissima. Known for its insulating down, this bird thrives in the north, and can be found all along the Norwegian coastline. Here it can dive an impressive 60 meters to hunt for blue mussels and crustaceans.
DNA was extracted from the blood of a female individual, and was sequenced on the PacBio Sequel II, and the Illumina NovaSeq 6000, which generated HiFi- and Hi-C reads respectively. The reads were assembled using hifiasm, scaffolded with YaHS, decontaminated with NCBI´s foreign contaminant screen-tool, and curated using the GRIT Rapid curation suite.
During curation we were able to identify 32 autosomes in each phased assembly, and the two allosomes, W and Z. The total length of the assembly containing both sex chromosomes is 1.2 giga basepairs, and has a scaffold N50 of 0.776 giga basepairs.
The sequencing data is available at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB61097. Haplotype 1 is available at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/GCA_951411735 and haplotype 2 is available at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/GCA_951416345.