Abstract Onthophagus binodis is a coprophagous scarab beetle native to southern Africa. This species and many others in the tribe Onthophagini have been introduced to farms across multiple continents in the context of cattle pasture management efforts. The ecosystem services provided by this species, along with the amenability of comparative developmental and evolutionary studies in this clade, contribute to its role as an emerging insect model system. Here, we present sex-specific chromosomal-level genome assemblies for O. binodis generated from a combination of PacBio long reads and HiC chromatin conformation sequencing. The completeness of the 950.5 Mb female assembly and the 880.5 Mb male assembly is indicated by a contig length N50 of at least 58.6 Mb. BUSCO single copy and duplicated completeness scores were 99.0% and 0.9% for the female assembly and 97.4% and 2.1% for the male assembly. Gene modelling identified at least 15,403 gene models in each genome with an average transcript length of 1.6 kb. Comparative analyses with other Onthophagini genomes indicated a dramatic expansion of repetitive sequences, which now comprise over 75% of this species’ genome and have driven the expansion of overall genome size to nearly twice that of close relatives. We combined the best-assembled chromosome-scale scaffolds from each sex to generate a hybrid reference assembly for this species. Comparative genomic analyses show that the 9 autosomes and the X chromosome identified here in O. binodis are likely conserved throughout Onthophagini. Our sex-specific sequencing approach allowed us to identify putative Y chromosome sequences in the male assembly via coverage mapping and k-mer abundance comparisons. These genomes will be of great value to the scientific community as resources for studying insect genome evolution, development, and ecology.
Nadolski et al. (Wed,) studied this question.