Tunstrom, KalleWheat, Christopher W.Parmesan, CSinger, Michael C.Mikheyev, Alexander2024-04-082024-04-081759-6653http://hdl.handle.net/1885/316556Insects have been key players in the assessments of biodiversity impacts of anthropogenically driven environmental change, including the evolutionary and ecological impacts of climate change. Populations of Edith’s Checkerspot Butterfly (Euphydryas editha) adapt rapidly to diverse environmental conditions, with numerous high-impact studies documenting these dynamics over several decades. However, studies of the underlying genetic bases of these responses have been hampered by missing genomic resources, limiting the ability to connect genomic responses to environmental change. Using a combination of Oxford Nanopore long reads, haplotype merging, HiC scaffolding followed by Illumina polishing, we generated a highly contiguous and complete assembly (contigs n = 142, N50 = 21.2 Mb, total length = 607.8 Mb; BUSCOs n = 5,286, single copy complete = 97.8%, duplicated = 0.9%, fragmented = 0.3%, missing = 1.0%). A total of 98% of the assembled genome was placed into 31 chromosomes, which displayed large-scale synteny with other well-characterized lepidopteran genomes. The E. editha genome, annotation, and functional descriptions now fill a missing gap for one of the leading field-based ecological model systems in North America.The authors would like to acknowledge support from the Swedish Research Council to C.W.W. (2017-04386), the French Make Our Planet Great Again award to C.P. (project CCISS, number ANR-17-MPGA-0007), the Laboratoires d’Excellences (LABEX) TULIP (ANR-10-LABX-41) to C.P., and 50% cofunding from the Science for Life LaboratoryNational Project on Biodiversity for the 10× Chromium data (2014/R2-77) to C.W.Wapplication/pdfen-AU© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/genomelong-read sequencingHiC scaffoldingclimate-change model202210.1093/gbe/evac1132022-11-13Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License