The Asian longhorned beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis (Motschulsky), and the citrus longhorned beetle, A. malasiaca (Thomson) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae), represent two globally notorious forest pests whose introductions into North America and Europe have caused extensive damage to economically important temperate deciduous hardwood forests. Anoplophora glabripennis was the first longhorned beetle for which a reference genome was generated; however, the available assembly remains at the scaffold level, limiting chromosome-level analyses in a species that has emerged as a key model for investigating the genomic and ecological basis of plant-feeding evolution. Here, we present the first chromosome-scale genome assemblies for A. glabripennis and A. malasiaca, generated using PacBio HiFi long read and Pore-C chromatin conformation capture sequencing. The assembled genomes span 730.1 Mbp and 708.0 Mbp for A. glabripennis and A. malasiaca, respectively, with scaffold N50 of 81.3 Mbp and 43.9 Mbp. A total of 96.7% and 95.2% of each assembly was anchored to 10 and 15 chromosome-level scaffolds, respectively, and the X chromosome was identified through synteny analysis. Repeat elements account for 66.5% and 65.5% of the genomes, and 14,624 and 13,814 protein-coding genes were functionally annotated. These reference-quality genomes provide a valuable comparative framework for elucidating the genomic basis of xylophagy and temperate adaptation in longhorned beetles and establish a foundation for devising targeted management strategies against invasive populations of both A. glabripennis and A. malasiaca in their introduced regions.
Kim et al. (Sat,) studied this question.