A draft genome assembly for the dart-poison frog Phyllobates terribilis

Roberto Marquez, Denis Jacob Machado, Reyhaneh Nouri, Kerry L. Gendreau, Daniel Janies, Ralph A. Saporito, Marcus R. Kronforst, Taran Grant

Dendrobatid poison frogs have become well established as model systems in several fields of biology. Nevertheless, the development of molecular and genetic resources for these frogs has been hindered by their large, highly repetitive genomes, which have proven difficult to assemble. Here we present a draft assembly for Phyllobates terribilis (12.6Gb), generated using a combination of sequencing platforms and bioinformatic approaches. Similar to other poison frog sequencing efforts, we recovered a highly fragmented assembly, likely due to the genome’s large size and very high repetitive content, which we estimate to be ≈ 88%. Despite the assembly’s low contiguity, we were able to annotate multiple members of three gene sets of interest (voltage-gated sodium channels and Notch and Wnt signaling pathways), demonstrating the usefulness of our assembly to the amphibian research community.