Symbiotic partnerships between hosts and microbes drive evolutionary innovation by expanding metabolic capacity, yet how these partnerships are integrated into superorganismal systems remains poorly understood in social insects. In the herbivorous Tetraponera nigra- group ants, we previously identified an adult-specific bacterial pouch that enables colony-wide nutritional symbiosis. However, this partnership has been characterized primarily from the symbiont side. The lack of high-quality genomic resources for this clade of Tetraponera ants has hindered in-depth exploration of the host genetic basis underlying beneficial host-symbiont interactions. Here, we report the first chromosomal-level genome assembly of T. attenuata , a species belonging to the T. nigra- group ants, leveraging PacBio HiFi long reads and Hi-C data. The assembled genome size is 323.72 Mb, with a scaffold N50 of 14.16 Mb and high completeness (BUSCO score 95.98%). A total of 99.93% of assembly sequences were anchored to 21 chromosomes, consistent with its karyotype (2n = 42). Genome annotation revealed that repetitive sequences constitute 41.66% of the assembly and we identified 12,929 predicted protein-coding genes, of which 11,785 were functionally annotated. This high-quality genome provides a crucial foundation for dissecting the host genetic mechanisms of superorganismal co-adaptation in nutritional symbiosis.
Wu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.