Publication Abstract

The success of the Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) as an aquaculture species is partly the result of continuous selective breeding leading to high performing strains. These elite strains have been derived from breeding populations of diverse origins and from crosses with other Oreochromis species. Because of the complex and unique evolutionary history of each of these strains, current reference genomes derived from wild populations are not suitable for the implementation of genomic selection. Here we generated a high-quality genome assembly for the WorldFish Nile tilapia elite strain Abbassa using a combination of PacBio HiFi, and Illumina Hi-C sequencing. As a male Abbassa Nile tilapia was used for the generation of the genome assembly, we reconstructed both X and Y haplotype, identifying both amhY and amhΔy on LG23 indicating that Abbassa likely shares the same sex determination system as GIFT, and thereby differs from the existing reference genome, whose sex determination loci are located on LG1

Etherington GJ.^*, Ciezarek A.^*, Mehta T.*, Barker T.,  Durrant A., Fraser F., Henderson S., Irish N., Kaithakottil GG., Knitlhoffer V., Ali, S., Trong T., Watkins C., Swarbreck D., Gharbi K., Benzie JAH., Haerty W.