Genome assemblies
A total of 8 assemblies were produced. In general, assemblies indicated
an estimated genome size of approximately 1.2Gb, and a GC content of
41%, with a completeness of 90%. The extra polishing step did not
significantly affect these statistics. We proceeded with the assemblies
that presented the best NG50 and N50 statistic, for each morph, and with
the lesser overlap permission (1000 bp) as it provided longer contigs.
Coverages of selected draft genomes were 75x for the grey morph
(organized into 11 scaffolds and 1686 contigs) and 63x for the brown
morph (organized into 13 scaffolds and 1793 other contigs) (Table1;
Table S3). Assembly completeness analyses against avian-specific gene
databases with busco revealed high levels of completeness - 97%
for both genomes (Fig. S1A-B). Identification of repeated elements
showed the two genomes to be very similar in terms of known mobile
elements (Table S4). Gene finding tools were instructed to annotate
introns, start, stop codons as well as gene coding regions. A total of
20.738 genes/transcripts were predicted in our draft assembly of the
grey morph.