Abstract
Ticks from the genus Rhipicephalus have enormous global economic impact as ectoparasites of cattle. Rhipicephalus microplus and Rhipicephalus annulatus are known to harbor infectious pathogens such as Babesia bovis, Babesia bigemina, and Anaplasma marginale. Having reference quality genomes of these ticks would advance research to identify druggable targets for chemical entities with acaricidal activity and refine anti-tick vaccine approaches. We sequenced and assembled the genomes of R. microplus and R. annulatus, using Pacific Biosciences and HiSeq 4000 technologies on very high molecular weight genomic DNA. We used 22 and 29 SMRT cells on the Pacific Biosciences Sequel for R. microplus and R. annulatus, respectively, and 3 lanes of the Illumina HiSeq 4000 platform for each tick. The PacBio sequence yields for R. microplus and R. annulatus were 21.0 and 27.9 million subreads, respectively, which were assembled with Canu v. 1.7. The final Canu assemblies consisted of 92,167 and 57,796 contigs with an average contig length of 39,249 and 69,055 bp for R. microplus and R. annulatus, respectively. Annotated genome quality was assessed by BUSCO analysis to provide quantitative measures for each assembled genome. Over 82% and 92% of the 1066 member BUSCO gene set was found in the assembled genomes of R. microplus and R. annulatus, respectively. For R. microplus, only 189 of the 1066 BUSCO genes were missing and only 140 were present in a fragmented condition. For R. annulatus, only 75 of the BUSCO genes were missing and only 109 were present in a fragmented condition. The raw sequencing reads and the assembled contigs/scaffolds are archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.