De Novo Assembly and Annotation of the Asian Tiger Mosquito(Aedesalbopictus)RepeatomewithdnaPipeTEfrom Raw Genomic Reads and Comparative Analysis with the Yellow Fever Mosquito (Aedes aegypti)

welsch, glenn a;

Repetitive DNA, including transposable elements (TEs), is found throughout eukaryotic genomes. Annotating and assembling the “repeatome” during genome-wide analysis often poses a challenge. To address this problem, we present dnaPipeTE—a new bioinformatics pipeline that uses a sample of raw genomic reads. It produces precise estimates of repeated DNA content and TE consensus sequences, as well as the relative ages of TE families. We shows that dnaPipeTE performs well using very low coverage sequencing indifferent genomes, losing accuracy only with old TE families. We applied this pipeline to the genome of the Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus, aninvasive speciesof human health interest, for which the genome size is estimated tobe over 1Gbp. Using dna Pipe TE, we showed that this species harbors a large (50%of the genome) and potentially active repeat ome with an over all TE class and order composition similar to that of Aedesaegypti, the yellow fever mosquito. However, intra order dynamics show clear distinctions between the two species, with differences at the TE family level. Our pipeline’s ability to manage the repeatome annotation problem will make it helpful for new or ongoing assembly projects, and our results will benefit future genomic studies of A. albopictus