Abstract
The white perch, Morone americana, is a widely distributed and ecologically important teleost native to the east coast of North America. Due to its ease of capture and high abundance across a range of ecological conditions, the white perch has been used - and continues to be developed - as a bioindicator of contaminant exposure. Outside of its native range, the white perch is invasive, negatively impacting local ecology and hybridizing with congeneric species. Using PacBio HiFi data, we present two (female and male) highly contiguous genome assemblies. The female assembly spans 694 Mb (264 contigs, N50: 24.9 Mb), with 85% of the total assembly size captured in the largest 24 contigs (the karyotype for the species is 2n = 48). The male assembly spans 688 Mb (265 contigs, N50: 26.4 Mb), with 89% of the total assembly size captured in the largest 24 contigs. Both assemblies have high BUSCO completeness scores of 98.7% (female) and 98.8% (male), and a high k-mer completeness (>98% for both genomes). Combining evidence derived from transcriptomic data and a large protein database, we constructed a high-quality annotation for the female assembly (99% BUSCO completeness, 87% OMArk completeness), including 20,699 predicted protein-coding genes, of which 20,406 have a functional annotation and 16,187 have an associated gene name. These reference genomes will support the development of the white perch as a bioindicator and will serve as an important resource for studying the species' invasiveness and monitoring intraspecific hybridization using genomic tools.