Development of a Genomic Toolkit for Haliotis species

Commercial abalone aquaculture has greatly expanded over the past decade, becoming a thriving global industry valued at over $100 million USD. Abalone is one of the few species where culture production dominates the global market as a result of increasing demand and declining natural stocks from overexploitation and disease. U.S. abalone production is also growing due to high market value and demand. Most farms operating in California utilize three native west coast species: red abalone (Haliotis rufescens), green abalone (H. fulgens), and pink abalone (H. corrugata). These species differ in commercially important traits that are key to culture expansion in California and improved production efficiency (e.g., growth rate, disease resistance, thermal tolerance). Despite previous genetic work, improvement to abalone production is limited by the available genomic data. Here, as a first step in developing genomic resource, we report draft genome assemblies for red, green, pink and black abalone (H. cracherodii) species. The initial assemblies were generated from paired end data with the estimated coverage of 63X, 64X, 50X and 49X for red, green, pink and black respectively. Platanus (version 1.2.4) was used to generate contigs. We plan to use Dovetail Chicago libraries to assemble these contigs to scaffold, to further improve the genome assembly and to conduct comparative genomic analyses of these genomes.