Melitaea cinxia (Glanville fritillary) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Melitaea cinxia

Melitaea cinxia, the Glanville Fritillary, is a member of the Nymphalidae, the largest butterfly family. Named after a 17th century English lepidopterist, Lady Eleanor Glanville, its range in the UK is now restricted to the Isle of Wight, and although distributed widely across Europe, North Africa and Asia, populations are reportedly in decline. The spatially separated M. cinxia populations in the Åland Islands, Finland, have been used to study the ecological, genetic and evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation.

Picture credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons (Image source)

Assembly

The Melitaea cinxia genome was assembled by the Metapopulation Research Group (MRG) at the University of Helsinki [1]. The MelCinx1.0 assembly in Ensembl Metazoa consists of 8,260 scaffolds and a mitochondrial chromosome. A
"superscaffold
" assembly, with 1,453 superscaffolds covering 72% of the genome is also available on the MRG website. Both scaffolds and superscaffolds have been assigned to chromosomes, and mappings are provided by the MRG.

Annotation

Protein coding and non-coding RNA genes were annotated by the same group responsible for the assembly [1]. Ensembl Metazoa displays version 1.1 of the gene set, which includes over 500 community annotated gene models and descriptions.

References

1. The Glanville fritillary genome retains an ancient karyotype and reveals selective chromosomal fusions in Lepidoptera.
   Ahola V, Lehtonen R, Somervuo P, Salmela L, Koskinen P, Rastas P, Vlimki N, Paulin L, Kvist J, Wahlberg N et al. 2014. Nature Communications. 5:4737.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.