Abstract
The sand martin (Riparia riparia), a widely distributed migratory songbird, is a promising model for evolutionary and population genetics due to its unique life-history traits. It also provides a valuable system for studying germline-restricted chromosome (GRC) inheritance and evolution. However, the absence of a high-quality genomic resource has limited in-depth investigation of these phenomena. Here, we present a chromosome-level somatic genome assembly for a R. riparia male generated using PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing and Hi-C scaffolding. The pseudohaploid assembly spans 1.19 Gb across 40 chromosome models and shows high completeness (97.6% BUSCO score). Repetitive elements make up 20.2% of the assembled chromosomes. A total of 19,624 protein-coding genes were annotated by integrating transcriptome evidence, ab initio gene prediction, and homology-based approaches. This high-quality reference genome provides a valuable foundation for studying population structure, adaptation, and evolutionary history in R. riparia. It serves as a critical resource for future assembly and investigation of the GRC, and contributes to a broader understanding of genome evolution in birds.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by the grant of the state program of the «Sirius» Federal Territory «Scientific and technological development of the «Sirius» Federal Territory» (Agreement №26-03, 27/09/2024) (Material isolation and fixation, chromatin conformation capture-based libraries preparation and sequencing, data analysis including genome assembly and annotation). Preliminary data analysis was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 23-14-00182) and Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (grant numbers #FSUS-2024-0018 and #FWNR-2026-0024). A.T. was supported by the Bonn Institute for Organismic Biology - Animal Diversity (University of Bonn). We thank Tatiana Bikchurina for helping with RNA extraction and members of the Suh lab for helpful discussions.
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Nuriddinov, M., Malinovskaya, L., Bobrovskikh, A. et al. Chromosome-level genome assembly of the sand martin (Riparia riparia). Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07311-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07311-2
