Abstract The two-spotted cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus, is a key hemimetabolous model organism for developmental biology, neuroscience, and regeneration. The existing reference genome is, however, highly fragmented into 47, 877 scaffolds, hampering chromosome-scale analyses for these fields. Here, we report a high-quality, chromosome-scale genome assembly for the white-eyed mutant strain of this cricket, generated using a combination of Nanopore and PacBio HiFi long reads, integrated with Hi-C data. The final 1. 62 Gbp assembly achieves a scaffold N50 of 107. 4 Mbp, a significant improvement in contiguity over the previous 6. 3 Mbp N50. We anchored 94. 45% of the assembly into 15 pseudomolecules, consistent with the known karyotype (n = 15). The genome completeness (BUSCO v6. 0. 0 insectaₒdb12) reached 98. 1%. We also updated the annotation, identifying 14, 964 protein-coding genes. This gene set shows markedly improved completeness (BUSCO v6. 0. 0 insectaₒdb12: 95. 7%) compared with the previous annotation (81. 2%) and successfully recovers all nine essential neuropeptide genes previously reported as missing from the draft assembly. This chromosome-scale genomic resource provides an essential foundation for comparative and functional genomics in G. bimaculatus.
Kataoka et al. (Thu,) studied this question.