Draft Genome Assembly of an Iconic Arctic Species: Muskox (Ovibos moschatus)
Open accessAbstract
Muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus) are Arctic species within the Caprinae subfamily that are economically and culturally significant to northern Indigenous communities. Low genetic diversity from repeated genetic bottlenecks, coupled with the effects of Arctic warming (e.g., heat stress, changing forage, pathogen range expansions), present conservation concerns for this species. Reference genome assemblies enhance our ecological and evolutionary understanding of species (which in turn aid conservation efforts). Herein, we provide a full draft reference genome of muskox using Illumina Hiseq data and cross-species scaffolding. The final reference assembly yielded a genome of 2,621,890,883 bp in length, a scaffold N50 of ~13.2 million, and an annotation identifying ~19.3 k genes. The muskox genome assembly and annotation were then used to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree which estimated muskoxen diverged from other ungulate species~12 Mya. To gain insight into the demographic history of muskoxen we also performed pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC) that identified two population bottlenecks coinciding with major glaciation events contributing to the notoriously low genetic variation observed in muskoxen. Overall, this genome assembly provides a foundation for future population genomic studies, such as latitudinal analyses, to explore the capacity of muskoxen to adapt to rapidly changing environments.
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The previous draft short-read assemblies of the muskox are relatively incomplete and fragmented.
“While these assemblies provided an important first glimpse of the muskox genome, they are relatively incomplete and fragmented, typical of assemblies derived from short reads.”
From Chromosomal-level reference genome assembly of muskox (Ovibos moschatus) from Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, a resource for conservation genomics (2024) · cites this paper as [37]
The Results (§3.1; page unavailable) describe an initial short-read assembly as fragmented, with about 822,000 contigs and 65.6% complete BUSCO genes. But the paper describes its final draft as mainly composed of large scaffolds, with 87.9% complete BUSCO genes; it does not characterize that final assembly as fragmented. The claim applies the characterization more broadly than this source supports. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Prewer, E., Vilaça, S. T., Bird, S., Kutz, S. J., Leclerc, L., & Kyle, C. J. (2023) · Ecology and Evolution · doi:10.1002/ece3.10192 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
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Mishra, S., Crookes, S., Caudill, C. M., Marston, E. L., Kutz, S. J., Kyle, C. J., Pulsifer, P., Murray, M. S., & Bhatnagar, S. (2025) · ARCTIC · doi:10.14430/arctic81670
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- Authors
- Prewer, E., Kutz, S., Leclerc, L.-M., & Kyle, C. J.
- Affiliations
- Trent University (CA)
- University of Calgary (CA)
- Government of Nunavut (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Prewer, Erin
- Venue
- Genes
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2022-05-01
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 809
- ISSN
- 2073-4425 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC9140810
- OpenAlex
- W4225258176
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 0.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Genes (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Federal Open Science Repository of Canada / Le Dépôt fédéral de science ouverte du Canada (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- ArcticNet
- Canada North Outfitting
- Polar Knowledge Canada
- Government of Nunavut and the Government
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic diversity and population structure
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic and phenotypic traits in livestock
- Keywords
- Ovibos moschatus, draft genome assembly, genome annotation, phylogenetic divergence, population bottleneck, demographic history, glaciation, genetic diversity, Arctic conservation, Caprinae
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Biological Evolution, Phylogeny, Ruminants, Genome, High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
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