De Novo Genome Assembly for the Coppery Titi Monkey (Plecturocebus cupreus): An Emerging Nonhuman Primate Model for Behavioral Research

• Published in: Genome biology and evolution 2024-05, Vol.16 (5)
• Main Authors: Pfeifer, Susanne P, Baxter, Alexander, Savidge, Logan E, Sedlazeck, Fritz J, Bales, Karen L
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animals; Genome; Genomics; Models, Animal; Pitheciidae - genetics
• ISSN: 1759-6653; 1759-6653
• DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evae108

The coppery titi monkey (Plecturocebus cupreus) is an emerging nonhuman primate model system for behavioral and neurobiological research. At the same time, the almost entire absence of genomic resources for the species has hampered insights into the genetic underpinnings of the phenotypic traits of interest. To facilitate future genotype-to-phenotype studies, we here present a high-quality, fully annotated de novo genome assembly for the species with chromosome-length scaffolds spanning the autosomes and chromosome X (scaffold N50 = 130.8 Mb), constructed using data obtained from several orthologous short- and long-read sequencing and scaffolding techniques. With a base-level accuracy of ∼99.99% in chromosome-length scaffolds as well as benchmarking universal single-copy ortholog and k-mer completeness scores of >99.0% and 95.1% at the genome level, this assembly represents one of the most complete Pitheciidae genomes to date, making it an invaluable resource for comparative evolutionary genomics research to improve our understanding of lineage-specific changes underlying adaptive traits as well as deleterious mutations associated with disease.