Bear Necessities: the Genome Assembly and Annotation of Tremarctos ornatus

The diversity within the family Ursidae makes it a model clade for studying speciation and rapid evolutionary changes in mammals. Tremarctos ornatus, the spectacled bear, is the sole member of the Ursidae family living in South America. The species is the second of the eight bears to have diverged from the family, approximately 5.8 mya, representing a sister taxon to all Ursines. The sub-family Tremarctinae, to which it belongs, consists of two species; the spectacled bear, and the North American short-faced bear, Tremarctos floridanus. T.floridanus has never been found in South America and based on remains of the spectacled bear, its current range of the tropical Andes is identical to its historic range and thus the evolutionary history of the genus remains unclear. The initial de novo assembly had an N50 of 35kb. Using a new method to create long-range read pairs through proximity ligation of in vitro reconstituted DNA resulted in a much-improved N50 of 16.2Mb. This represents the highest quality Ursidae assembly to date. RNA-Seq has yet to be used as a means of annotating the genome of a bear. Thus with such a high quality spectacled bear genome at hand, I will be able to construct a genome annotation of T.ornatus using only Ursidae genomic data that will be a means to study all bear molecular evolution.