2023 article Conservation Genomics, Felidae, Hi-C, PacBio, Proximity-Ligation Winter, Sven (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna) Meißner, René (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna) Greve, Carola (LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics) Ben Hamadou, Alexander (LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics) Horin, Petr (University of Veterinary Sciences Brno) Prost, Stefan (University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna / Natural History Museum Vienna / University of Oulu) Burger, Pamela A. (University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna) application/pdf eng doi:10.1093/jhered/esad015 https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3363 Oxford University Press A chromosome-scale high-contiguity genome assembly of the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) CC BY-NC 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Journal of Heredity 114(3), 271-278 (2023) The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus, SCHREBER 1775) is a large felid and is considered the fastest land animal. Historically, it inhabited open grassland across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwestern Asia; however, only small and fragmented populations remain today. Here, we present a de novo genome assembly of the cheetah based on PacBio continuous long reads and Hi-C proximity ligation data. The final assembly (VMU_Ajub_asm_v1.0) has a total length of 2.38 Gb, of which 99.7% are anchored into the expected 19 chromosome-scale scaffolds. The contig and scaffold N50 values of 96.8 Mb and 144.4 Mb, respectively, a BUSCO completeness of 95.4% and a k-mer completeness of 98.4%, emphasize the high quality of the assembly. Furthermore, annotation of the assembly identified 23,622 genes and a repeat content of 40.4%. This new highly contiguous and chromosome-scale assembly will greatly benefit conservation and evolutionary genomic analyses and will be a valuable resource, e.g., to gain a detailed understanding of the function and diversity of immune response genes in felids.