Genome assemblies
A total of 8 genome assemblies were produced. In general, assemblies
indicated an estimated genome size of approximately 1.2Gb, and a GC
content of 41%, with a completeness of 90% (Table 1, Table S4). The
extra polishing step did not significantly affect these statistics. We
proceeded with the assemblies that presented the best NG50 and N50
statistic, for each morph, and with the lesser overlap permission (1000
bp) as it provided longer contigs. Coverages of selected draft genomes
were 75x for the grey morph (organized into 11 scaffolds and 1686
contigs) and 63x for the brown morph (organized into 13 scaffolds and
1793 other contigs) (Table 1; Table S4). Assembly completeness analyses
against avian-specific gene databases with BUSCO revealed high levels of
completeness - 97% for both genomes (Fig. S1A-B). Identification of
repeated elements showed that the two genomes were very similar in terms
of known mobile elements (Table S5). Gene finding tools were instructed
to annotate introns, start, stop codons as well as gene coding regions.
A total of 20.738 genes/transcripts were predicted in our draft assembly
of the grey morph.