The cotton seed bug, Oxycarenus hyalinipennis Costa (Hemiptera: Lygaeidae), is an invasive cotton pest detected in California, United States, in 2019. This report details the assembly and annotation of a reference genome for O. hyalinipennis , which will assist with the development of control strategies and provide evolutionary insight into this pest and hemipterans in general. The genome was sequenced from an adult male specimen using PacBio HiFi long reads and Element short-read sequencing of a HiC library. The assembly is 727,196,238 bp long with an N50 of 116 Mb. A total of 28,646 genes were identified by a customized annotation pipeline. Comparative genomics results suggest that chromosomal rearrangements may be common within Pentatomomorpha, based on syntenic analyses across all superfamilies. Comparison between available heteropteran genomes was used to identify changes in gene family size, as well as evolutionary differences, between taxa with different feeding strategies. Notably, herbivorous taxa had significantly larger genomes than predatory taxa. These genomic resources will be useful in efforts to understand and control this pest and advance the understanding of hemipteran evolution.
Heraghty et al. (Sun,) studied this question.