A chromosome‐level genome assembly provides new insights into paternal genome elimination in the cotton mealybug Phenacoccus solenopsis

Abstract Mealybugs (Hemiptera: Pseudococcidae) are economically important agricultural pests with several compelling biological phenomena including paternal genome elimination (PGE). However, limited high‐quality genome assemblies of mealybugs hinder a full understanding of this striking and unusual biological phenomenon. Here, we generated a chromosome‐level genome assembly of cotton mealybug, Phenacoccus solenopsis , by combining Illumina short reads, PacBio long reads and Hi‐C scaffolding. The assembled genome was 292.54 Mb with a contig N50 of 489.8 kb and a scaffold N50 of 49.0 Mb. Hi‐C scaffolding assigned 84.42% of the bases to five chromosomes. A total of 110.75 Mb (37.9%) repeat sequences and 11,880 protein‐coding genes were predicted. The completeness of the genome assembly was estimated to be 95.5% based on BUSCO genes. In addition, 27,086 (95.3%) full‐length PacBio transcripts were uniquely mapped to the assembled scaffolds, suggesting the high quality of the genome assembly. We showed that cotton mealybugs lack differentiated sex chromosomes by analysing genome resequencing data of males and females. DAPI staining confirmed that one chromosome set in males becomes heterochromatin at an early embryo stage. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assays with sequencing analysis demonstrated that the epigenetic modifications H3K9me3 and H3K27me3 are distributed across the whole genome in males, suggesting that these two modifications might be involved in maintaining heterochromatin status. Both markers were more likely to be distributed in repeat regions, while H3K27me3 had higher overall enrichment. Our results provide a valuable genomic resource and shed new light on the genomic and epigenetic basis of PGE in cotton mealybugs.