The Turpan minnow (Phoxinus grumi) is a small endemic fish species inhabiting the extreme environment of the Turpan Basin in Xinjiang, China, holding significant value for evolutionary and conservation biology research. However, the absence of a high-quality reference genome has severely constrained studies on its adaptive evolution and conservation genetics, in stark contrast to the available chromosome-level genomes of its congeners, such as Phoxinus phoxinus. A total of 240.38 Gb of sequencing data was generated in this study, comprising 44.12Gb (53.35×) of PacBio HiFi reads, 50.36 Gb (60.90×) of Illumina reads, 120.59 Gb (133.95×) of Hi-C data and 25.31 Gb of RNA sequencing data, which enabled the successful assembly of a chromosome-level genome for P. grumi. The assembled genome has a total size of 900.41 Mb, with 97.58% of the sequences anchored onto 25 chromosomes. The contig N50 and scaffold N50 reached 17.52 Mb and 34.99 Mb, respectively. BUSCO assessment indicated a genome completeness of 98.1%. We predicted a total of 24,224 protein-coding genes, of which 90.8% were functionally annotated. This high-quality reference genome will serve as a key genetic resource for in-depth exploration of the environmental adaptation mechanisms and species conservation of P. grumi.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.