Despite intense interest in bees, no genomes are available for the bee family Colletidae. Colletes gigas, one of the largest species of the genus Colletes in the world, is an ideal candidate to fill this gap.
Endemic to China, C. gigas has been the focus of studies on its nesting biology and pollination of the economically-important oil tree Camellia oleifera, which is chemically-defended.
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To enable deeper study of its biology, we sequenced the whole genome of Colletes gigas using single molecule real time (SMRT) sequencing on the PacBio Sequel platform. In total, 40.58G (150X) of long reads were generated and the final assembly of 326 scaffolds was 273.06 Mb with a N50 length of 8.11 Mb, which captured 94.4% complete Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCOs).
We predicted 11,016 protein-coding genes, of which 98.50% and 84.75% were supported by protein- and transcriptome-based evidence, respectively.
In addition, we identified 26.27% of repeats and 870 non-coding RNAs. The bee phylogeny with this newly-sequenced colletid genome is consistent with available results, supporting Colletidae as sister to Halictidae when Stenotritidae is not included.
Gene family evolution analyses identified 9,069 gene families, of which 70 experienced significant expansions (33 families) or contractions (37 families), and it appears that olfactory receptors and carboxylesterase may be involved in specializing on and detoxifying Camellia oleifera pollen. Our high-quality draft genome for C. gigas lays the foundation for insights on the biology and behavior of this species, including its evolutionary history, nesting biology and interactions with the plant Camellia oleifera.