The genome of the Australian dragon lizard Pogona vitticeps

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We present a genomic resource for a wild-caught male ZZ Central Bearded Dragon Pogona vitticeps, from Australia. The genomic sequence, generated on the Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform, comprised 317 Gbp (185x raw read depth) from 13 insert libraries ranging from 250 bp to 40 Kbp. After filtering for low quality and duplicated reads, a total of 146 Gbp of data (86x) was available for assembly. Exceptionally high levels of heterozygosity (0.85 % SNP plus indels) complicated assembly, nevertheless 96.4% of reads mapped back to the assembled scaffolds indicating that the assembly included most of the sequenced genome. The total length of the assembly was 1.8 Gbp in 545,310 scaffolds (69,852 longer than 300 bp), the longest being 14.68 Mbp, with an N50 of 2.29 Mbp.

We also present transcriptome data from brain, heart, lung, liver, kidney, skeletal muscle and gonads of male and female P. vitticeps, assembled these datasets (from seven individuals) into 595,564 contigs.

Genes were annotated on the basis of de novo prediction, similarity to Anolis carolinensis, Gallus gallus and Homo sapiens proteins, and Pogona vitticeps transcriptome sequence assemblies, to yield 19,406 protein-coding genes in the assembly, 63% of which had intact open reading frames. Our assembly captured 99% (246 of 248) of the core CEGMA genes, with 93% (231) being complete.