The Genome of the Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas)

• Main Authors: Steven J. M. Jones, Gregory A. Taylor, Simon Chan, René L. Warren, S. Austin Hammond, Steven Bilobram, Gideon Mordecai, Curtis A. Suttle, Kristina M. Miller, Angela Schulze, Amy M. Chan, Samantha J. Jones, Kane Tse, Irene Li, Dorothy Cheung, Karen L. Mungall, Caleb Choo, Adrian Ally, Noreen Dhalla, Angela K. Y. Tam, Armelle Troussard, Heather Kirk, Pawan Pandoh, Daniel Paulino, Robin J. N. Coope, Andrew J. Mungall, Richard Moore, Yongjun Zhao, Inanc Birol, Yussanne Ma, Marco Marra, Martin Haulena
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2017-12-01
• Series: Genes
• Subjects: genome; genome assembly; beluga whale; Delphinapterus leucas; Cetacea
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/8/12/378
• ISSN: 2073-4425

The beluga whale is a cetacean that inhabits arctic and subarctic regions, and is the only living member of the genus Delphinapterus. The genome of the beluga whale was determined using DNA sequencing approaches that employed both microfluidic partitioning library and non-partitioned library construction. The former allowed for the construction of a highly contiguous assembly with a scaffold N50 length of over 19 Mbp and total reconstruction of 2.32 Gbp. To aid our understanding of the functional elements, transcriptome data was also derived from brain, duodenum, heart, lung, spleen, and liver tissue. Assembled sequence and all of the underlying sequence data are available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) under the Bioproject accession number PRJNA360851A.