Draft genomes of a male and female Australian jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus)

Abstract

Australia is remarkable for its lizard diversity, with very high endemicity because of continental-scale diversification and adaptive radiation. We employed 10X Genomics Chromium linked-reads technology to generate male and female draft genomes of the jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), an Australian dragon lizard (family Agamidae). The assemblies are 1.8 Gb in size and have a repeat content (38%) and GC content (42%) similar to other dragon lizards. The contig N50 values for the assemblies were 37.2 kb (female) and 28.8 kb (male), with corresponding scaffold N50 values of 720.5 kb and 369 kb. The longest scaffold was 6.5 Mb in each assembly. The BUSCO completeness percentages were 92.2% and 90.8% respectively. These statistics are comparable to other lizard genomes assembled using similar technology. Phylogenetic comparisons show that Australian dragon lizard species split from a common ancestor around 33.4 million years ago. The draft A. muricatus assemblies will be a valuable resource for understanding lizard sex determination and the evolution and conservation of Australian dragon lizards.