Abstract
The casuarina moth, Lymantria xylina, is a serious pest threatening subtropical regions through severe defoliation and strong invasive potential. Despite its economic impact and high invasion risk, a high-quality reference genome remains lacking. To bridge this knowledge gap, we generated a chromosome-level genome assembly for L. xylina combining Illumina short-reads, Oxford Nanopore long-reads, and high-throughput chromatin conformation capture (Hi-C) scaffolding data. Following long-reads based assembly and Hi-C scaffolding, the final genome assembly totals 977.74 Mb, with 930.50 Mb (95.17%) of sequences anchored onto 31 pseudo-chromosomes, achieving a scaffold N50 of 34.15 Mb. The genome assembly, featuring fully assembled telomeres on all 31 pseudo-chromosomes, demonstrates 94.5% Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) completeness and high accuracy with consensus quality value of 31.72. Repetitive elements constitute 77.18% of the genome, and 18,484 protein-coding genes were predicted, with 95.21% functionally annotated. This high-quality genome assembly provides a critical foundation for elucidating interaction mechanisms with host plants and natural enemies (nucleopolyhedrovirus, Beauveria bassiana), for developing enhanced pest management and control strategies.
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Data availability
The raw sequencing reads have been deposited in GSA (CRA027397, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gsa). Additionally, raw high-throughput sequencing data for L. xylina have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive with accession number SRP655858. The genome assembly of L. xylina is available in GWH (GWHGEMT00000000.1, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gwh) and GenBank (JBPSJU000000000). Genome annotation and related data are available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29497898). All untargeted metabolomic data used in this publication have been deposited to the EMBL-EBl MetaboLights database with the identifier MTBLS13575 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/MTBLS13575). Additionally, the processed metabolomics dataset, including metabolite identification tables and quality control metrics, has been deposited in Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30909260.
Code availability
No custom code was used for this study. All data analyses were performed using published bioinformatics software with specified parameter settings, as stated in the Methods section and Figshare65.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 31600522) and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (grant number: 2017J0106).
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W.R. designed this study. S.L., H.J., T.N. carried out genome sequencing. S.L., H.J., T.N., K.W., X.H., S.W. performed the data analyses and visualization. S.L., H.J., T.N. drafted the manuscript. W.R., F.Z. revised the manuscript. All authors contributed the final text of the manuscript.
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Liu, S., Jiang, H., Ni, T. et al. Chromosome-level genome assembly of the casuarina moth, Lymantria xylina Swinhoe (1903). Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06724-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06724-3
