A reference genome for the critically endangered woylie, Bettongia penicillata ogilbyi

Biodiversity is declining globally, and Australia has one of the worst extinction records for mammals. The development of sequencing technologies means that genomic approaches are now available as important tools for wildlife conservation and management. Despite this, genome sequences are available for only 5% of threatened Australian species. Here we report the first reference genome for the woylie ( Bettongia penicillata ogilbyi ), a critically endangered marsupial from Western Australia, and the first genome within the Potoroidae family. The woylie reference genome was generated using Pacific Biosciences HiFi long-reads, resulting in a 3.39 Gbp assembly with a scaffold N50 of 6.49 Mbp and 86.5% complete mammalian BUSCOs. Assembly of a global transcriptome from pouch skin, tongue, heart and blood RNA-seq reads was used to guide annotation with Fgenesh++, resulting in the annotation of 24,655 genes. The woylie reference genome is a valuable resource for conservation, management and investigations into disease-induced decline of this critically endangered marsupial. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. * ### List of abbreviations BLAST : Basic Local Alignment Search Tool bp : base pair (BUSCO) : Benchmarking Universal SingleCopy Orthologs BP : biological process (BP) GO : Gene Ontology Gbp : gigabase pair HMW : high molecular weight IUCN : International Union for Conservation of Nature LINE : long interspersed nuclear element Mbp : megabase pair NCBI : National Center for Biotechnology Information NSW : New South Wales PE : paired end SINE : short interspersed nuclear element SA : South Australia WA : Western Australia