A strategy for complete telomere-to-telomere assembly of ciliate macronuclear genome using ultra-high coverage Nanopore data

Ciliates contain two kinds of nuclei: the germline micronucleus (MIC) and the somatic macronucleus (MAC) in a single cell. The MAC usually have fragmented chromosomes. These fragmented chromosomes, capped with telomeres at both ends, could be gene size to several megabases in length among different ciliate species. So far, no telomere-to-telomere assembly of the entire MAC genome in ciliate species is finished. Development of the third generation sequencing technologies allows researchers to generate sequencing reads up to megabases in length that could possibly span an entire MAC chromosome.

Taking advantage of ultra-long Nanopore reads, we established a simple strategy for the complete assembly of ciliate MAC genomes.

Using this strategy, we assembled the complete MAC genomes of two ciliate species Tetrahymena thermophila and Tetrahymena shanghaiensis, composed of 181 and 214 chromosomes telomere-to-telomere, respectively.

The established strategy as well as the high-quality genome data will provide a useful approach for ciliate genome assembly, and a valuable community resource for further biological, evolutionary and population genomic studies.