Acropora Millepora Genome Assembly from the 2017 Great Barrier Reef Bleaching Event

A draft genome assembly for the staghorn coral Acropora millepora, constructed from tissue samples collected during the 2017 mass bleaching event on the Central Great Barrier Reef. The assembly, produced by researchers from institutions including the New York Genome Center and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has a total length of 475.4 Mb and contains 28,188 predicted gene models. It combines PacBio and Illumina sequencing with scaffolding from 10X Genomics barcodes and linkage maps.

Use Cases

• Identify genetic markers associated with coral bleaching tolerance based on linked phenotypic and genomic data.
• Study genome structure and gene annotation in reef-building corals using the provided GFF3 and fasta files.
• Analyze repetitive DNA elements in coral genomes using the repeat family annotations.
• Perform comparative genomics with other coral species using the chromosome-scale scaffold assembly.

Strengths

• Assembly is chromosome-scale with a Scaffold N50 of 19.84 Mb, indicating high contiguity.
• Includes 28,188 predicted gene models with functional annotations from tools like Trinotate and eggnog-mapper.
• Data is linked to specific phenotypic observations from the 2017 mass bleaching event, enabling genotype-phenotype studies.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network, associated with the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) TWQ 4.4 and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

Collection Method

De novo genome assembly from PacBio and Illumina paired-end reads with 10X Genomics barcodes, scaffolded using published linkage maps.

Time Range

Samples collected in 2017.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-10 20:17:23.325235; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Central Great Barrier Reef.