title: Draft genome of an iconic Red Sea reef fish, the blacktail butterflyfish (Chaetodon austriacus): current status and its characteristics.
abstract: Butterflyfish are among the most iconic of the coral reef fishes and represent a model system to study general questions of biogeography, evolution and population genetics. We assembled and annotated the genome sequence of the blacktail butterflyfish (Chaetodon austriacus), an Arabian region endemic species that is reliant on coral reefs for food and shelter. Using available bony fish (superclass Osteichthyes) genomes as a reference, a total of 28 926 high-quality protein-coding genes were predicted from 13 967 assembled scaffolds. The quality and completeness of the draft genome of C. austriacus suggest that it has the potential to serve as a resource for studies on the co-evolution of reef fish adaptations to the unique Red Sea environment, as well as a comparison of gene sequences between closely related congeneric species of butterflyfish distributed more broadly across the tropical Indo-Pacific.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.|Department of Environment and Agriculture, Curtin University, PO Box U1987, Perth, WA, 6845, Australia.
authors.forename: Joseph D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: DiBattista
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.|Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Evolutivas, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, 5090000, Chile.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Saenz-Agudelo
authors.affiliation: Computational Bioscience Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Marek J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Piatek
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Aranda
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Red Sea Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Berumen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D005399:Fishes / Q000235:genetics*; D016678:Genome; D019156:Indian Ocean; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
keywords: Indo-Pacific; adaptation; aquarium trade; bony fish; endemism; genomics