A high-quality, chromosome-level genome assembly of the Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens L.)

Hermetia illucens L. (Diptera: Stratiomyidae), the Black Soldier Fly (BSF) is an increasingly important species for bioconversion of organic material into animal feed. We generated a high-quality chromosome-scale genome assembly of the BSF using Pacific Bioscience, 10X Genomics linked read and high-throughput chromosome conformation capture sequencing technology. Scaffolding the final assembly with Hi-C data produced a highly contiguous 1.01 Gb genome with 99.75% of scaffolds assembled into pseudochromosomes representing seven chromosomes with 16.01 Mb contig and 180.46 Mb scaffold N50 values. The highly complete genome obtained a BUSCO completeness of 98.6%. We masked 67.32% of the genome as repetitive sequences and annotated a total of 16,478 protein-coding genes using the BRAKER2 pipeline. We analysed an established lab population to investigate the genomic variation and architecture of the BSF revealing six autosomes and an X chromosome. Additionally, we estimated the inbreeding coefficient (1.9%) of a lab population by assessing runs of homozygosity. This provided evidence for inbreeding events including long runs of homozygosity on chromosome five. Release of this novel chromosome-scale BSF genome assembly will provide an improved resource for further genomic studies, functional characterisation of genes of interest and genetic modification of this economically important species. ; TNG was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BB/M011194/1. CDJ and IAW were supported by ERC Speciation Genetics Advanced Grant 339873. JMDW, K.H, J.T, Y.S and M.Q were supported by the Wellcome Trust core grant 206194. SAM and RD were supported by Wellcome grant WT207492 to perform genome assembly.