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Wellcome Open Res
Wellcome Open Res
Wellcome Open Research
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F1000 Research Limited London, UK

39257624
10.12688/wellcomeopenres.21627.1
Data Note
Articles
The genome sequence of the Lulworth Skipper, Thymelicus acteon (Rottemburg, 1775)
[version 1; peer review: 3 approved]

Lohse Konrad Investigation Resources Writing – Original Draft Preparation Writing – Review & Editing https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9918-058X
1
Vila Roger Investigation Resources Writing – Original Draft Preparation Writing – Review & Editing https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2447-4388
2
Hayward Alex Investigation Resources 3
Wellcome Sanger Institute Tree of Life Management, Samples and Laboratory team
Wellcome Sanger Institute Scientific Operations: Sequencing Operations
Wellcome Sanger Institute Tree of Life Core Informatics team
Tree of Life Core Informatics collective
Darwin Tree of Life Consortiuma
1 Institute of Ecology and Evolution, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2 Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, CSIC - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
3 Department of Biosciences, University of Exeter, Penryn, England, UK
a mark.blaxter@sanger.ac.uk
No competing interests were disclosed.

15 5 2024
2024
9 2661 5 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Lohse K et al.
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We present a genome assembly from an individual male Thymelicus acteon (the Lulworth Skipper; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Hesperiidae). The genome sequence is 537.0 megabases in span. Most of the assembly is scaffolded into 28 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the Z sex chromosome. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 17.08 kilobases in length. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl identified 12,813 protein-coding genes.

Thymelicus acteon
Lulworth Skipper
genome sequence
chromosomal
Lepidoptera
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilDavidPhillipsFellowship(BB/N020146/1) ERCModelGenomLand757648 Wellcome Trust218328 206194 NERCNE/L011522/1 Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciónPID2022-139689NB-I00 Agencia Estatal de Investigación10.13039/501100011033 European Regional Development FundAwayofmakingEurope This work was supported by Wellcome through core funding to the Wellcome Sanger Institute [206194, <a href=https://doi.org/10.35802/206194>https://doi.org/10.35802/206194</a>] and the Darwin Tree of Life Discretionary Award [218328, <a href=https://doi.org/10.35802/218328>https://doi.org/10.35802/218328 </a>]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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pmcSpecies taxonomy

Eukaryota; Opisthokonta; Metazoa; Eumetazoa; Bilateria; Protostomia; Ecdysozoa; Panarthropoda; Arthropoda; Mandibulata; Pancrustacea; Hexapoda; Insecta; Dicondylia; Pterygota; Neoptera; Endopterygota; Amphiesmenoptera; Lepidoptera; Glossata; Neolepidoptera; Heteroneura; Ditrysia; Obtectomera; Hesperioidea; Hesperiidae; Hesperiinae; Hesperiini; Thymelicus; Thymelicus acteon (Rottemburg, 1775) (NCBI:txid876078).

Background

The Lulworth Skipper ( Thymelicus acteon) is a habitat specialist of warm grasslands in North Africa, Southern and Central Europe, the Middle East and Western Asia. Thymelicus acteon reaches its Northern range limit in the South of England where it occurs in a number of localities on south-facing limestone and chalk grasslands in Dorset, centred around the village of Lulworth where it was first recorded in the UK in 1832. It is absent from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Lulworth Skipper is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN and UK Red lists ( Fox et al., 2015; Van Swaay et al., 2010), but in the UK it has increased in abundance since 2014, possibly as a result of climate change. The species is univoltine with adults occurring from the end of April to August depending on locality. Eggs are laid in a row in flower-sheaths of Tor-grass ( Brachypodium pinnatum), the principal larval host plant in the UK, although it feeds on several other grasses across its range.

The Lulworth skipper has lower overall genetic diversity compared to its congeners T. sylvestris and T. lineola ( Mackintosh et al., 2019). At the local scale in Central Europe it shows no isolation by distance, but relatively high genetic structure ( Louy et al., 2007). Population connectivity has been shown to be strongly influenced by land use patterns ( Engler et al., 2014). In the Western Palearctic, this species shows several geographically-structured mitochondrial lineages ( Dapporto et al., 2022) as well as phenotypic variation: darker forms occur in north-west Africa, Iberia, Elba, Crete, and other eastern Mediterranean islands. The taxon christi, previously considered a subspecies of T. acteon, is now generally treated as a species endemic to the Canary Islands.

The Lulworth skipper has 28 chromosomes ( de Lesse, 1970); the genome size has been estimated as 517.4 Mb ( Mackintosh et al., 2019).

Genome sequence report

The genome was sequenced from a male Thymelicus acteon ( Figure 1) collected from El Serrat, Catalunya, Spain (41.69, 2.25). A total of 42-fold coverage in Pacific Biosciences single-molecule HiFi long reads was generated. Primary assembly contigs were scaffolded with chromosome conformation Hi-C data. Manual assembly curation corrected 14 missing joins or mis-joins and removed 6 haplotypic duplications, reducing the assembly length by 0.77% and the scaffold number by 9.46%.

Figure 1. Photographs of forewings and hindwings of the Thymelicus acteon specimen ES_TS_344 (ilThyActe1) used for genome sequencing.

a) Dorsal and b) ventral surface views of wings from the specimen.

The final assembly has a total length of 537.0 Mb in 66 sequence scaffolds with a scaffold N50 of 19.7 Mb ( Table 1). The snail plot in Figure 2 provides a summary of the assembly statistics, while the distribution of assembly scaffolds on GC proportion and coverage is shown in Figure 3. The cumulative assembly plot in Figure 4 shows curves for subsets of scaffolds assigned to different phyla. Most (98.98%) of the assembly sequence was assigned to 28 chromosomal-level scaffolds, representing 27 autosomes and the Z sex chromosome. Chromosome-scale scaffolds confirmed by the Hi-C data are named in order of size ( Figure 5; Table 2). While not fully phased, the assembly deposited is of one haplotype. Contigs corresponding to the second haplotype have also been deposited. The mitochondrial genome was also assembled and can be found as a contig within the multifasta file of the genome submission.

Table 1. Genome data for Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.1.

Project accession data	
Assembly identifier	ilThyActe1.1	
Species	Thymelicus acteon	
Specimen	ilThyActe1	
NCBI taxonomy ID	876078	
BioProject	PRJEB59958	
BioSample ID	SAMEA110069525	
Isolate information	ilThyActe1, male: head (PacBio sequencing)
ilThyActe2, male: head (Hi-C sequencing)	
Assembly metrics *	Benchmark	
Consensus quality (QV)	65.0	≥ 50	
k-mer completeness	100.0%	≥ 95%	
BUSCO **	C:98.4%[S:98.0%,D:0.5%],F:0.4%,M:1.2%,n:5,286	C ≥ 95%	
Percentage of assembly mapped to chromosomes	98.98%	≥ 95%	
Sex chromosomes	Z	localised homologous pairs	
Organelles	Mitochondrial genome: 17.08 kb	complete single alleles	
Raw data accessions	
PacificBiosciences Sequel IIe	ERR10906098	
Hi-C Illumina	ERR10908636	
Genome assembly	
Assembly accession	GCA_951805285.1	
Accession of alternate haplotype	GCA_951805295.1	
Span (Mb)	537.0	
Number of contigs	120	
Contig N50 length (Mb)	10.7	
Number of scaffolds	66	
Scaffold N50 length (Mb)	19.7	
Longest scaffold (Mb)	40.67	
Genome annotation	
Number of protein-coding genes	12,813	
Number of non-coding genes	2,647	
Number of gene transcripts	25,933	
* Assembly metric benchmarks are adapted from column VGP-2020 of “Table 1: Proposed standards and metrics for defining genome assembly quality” from Rhie et al. (2021).

** BUSCO scores based on the lepidoptera_odb10 BUSCO set using version 5.3.2. C = complete [S = single copy, D = duplicated], F = fragmented, M = missing, n = number of orthologues in comparison. A full set of BUSCO scores is available at https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view/ilThyActe1_1/dataset/ilThyActe1_1/busco.

Figure 2. Genome assembly of Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.1: metrics.

The BlobToolKit snail plot shows N50 metrics and BUSCO gene completeness. The main plot is divided into 1,000 size-ordered bins around the circumference with each bin representing 0.1% of the 536,997,220 bp assembly. The distribution of scaffold lengths is shown in dark grey with the plot radius scaled to the longest scaffold present in the assembly (40,667,834 bp, shown in red). Orange and pale-orange arcs show the N50 and N90 scaffold lengths (19,676,428 and 13,448,605 bp), respectively. The pale grey spiral shows the cumulative scaffold count on a log scale with white scale lines showing successive orders of magnitude. The blue and pale-blue area around the outside of the plot shows the distribution of GC, AT and N percentages in the same bins as the inner plot. A summary of complete, fragmented, duplicated and missing BUSCO genes in the lepidoptera_odb10 set is shown in the top right. An interactive version of this figure is available at https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view/ilThyActe1_1/dataset/ilThyActe1_1/snail.

Figure 3. Genome assembly of Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.1: BlobToolKit GC-coverage plot.

Sequences are coloured by phylum. Circles are sized in proportion to sequence length. Histograms show the distribution of sequence length sum along each axis. An interactive version of this figure is available at https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view/ilThyActe1_1/dataset/ilThyActe1_1/blob.

Figure 4. Genome assembly of Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.1: BlobToolKit cumulative sequence plot.

The grey line shows cumulative length for all sequences. Coloured lines show cumulative lengths of sequences assigned to each phylum using the buscogenes taxrule. An interactive version of this figure is available at https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view/ilThyActe1_1/dataset/ilThyActe1_1/cumulative.

Figure 5. Genome assembly of Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.1: Hi-C contact map of the ilThyActe1.1 assembly, visualised using HiGlass.

Chromosomes are shown in order of size from left to right and top to bottom. An interactive version of this figure may be viewed at https://genome-note-higlass.tol.sanger.ac.uk/l/?d=DwelZModSOCAr3bDC4wEig.

Table 2. Chromosomal pseudomolecules in the genome assembly of Thymelicus acteon, ilThyActe1.

INSDC accession	Chromosome	Length (Mb)	GC%	
OX638213.1	1	23.4	36.5	
OX638214.1	2	24.07	37.0	
OX638215.1	3	22.12	36.5	
OX638216.1	4	22.48	36.5	
OX638217.1	5	21.31	36.5	
OX638218.1	6	21.33	36.0	
OX638219.1	7	20.81	36.0	
OX638220.1	8	20.0	36.0	
OX638221.1	9	20.19	36.0	
OX638222.1	10	20.0	36.5	
OX638223.1	11	19.68	36.0	
OX638224.1	12	18.87	36.0	
OX638225.1	13	18.82	36.0	
OX638226.1	14	18.75	36.0	
OX638227.1	15	18.52	36.5	
OX638228.1	16	18.31	36.0	
OX638229.1	17	17.7	36.0	
OX638230.1	18	17.2	36.0	
OX638231.1	19	17.38	36.5	
OX638232.1	20	17.12	36.5	
OX638233.1	21	16.51	36.5	
OX638234.1	22	15.74	36.5	
OX638235.1	23	13.45	36.0	
OX638236.1	24	13.2	36.5	
OX638237.1	25	12.18	36.5	
OX638238.1	26	12.01	37.0	
OX638239.1	27	9.73	36.5	
OX638212.1	Z	40.67	35.5	
OX638240.1	MT	0.02	16.5	

The estimated Quality Value (QV) of the final assembly is 65.0 with k-mer completeness of 100.0%, and the assembly has a BUSCO v5.3.2 completeness of 98.4% (single = 98.0%, duplicated = 0.5%), using the lepidoptera_odb10 reference set ( n = 5,286).

Metadata for specimens, barcode results, spectra estimates, sequencing runs, contaminants and pre-curation assembly statistics are given at https://links.tol.sanger.ac.uk/species/876078.

Genome annotation report

The Thymelicus acteon genome assembly (GCA_951805285.1) was annotated at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on Ensembl Rapid Release. The resulting annotation includes 25,933 transcribed mRNAs from 12,813 protein-coding and 2,647 non-coding genes ( Table 1; https://rapid.ensembl.org/Thymelicus_acteon_GCA_951805285.1/Info/Index).

Methods

Sample acquisition and nucleic acid extraction

Two male Thymelicus acteon specimens were collected from El Serrat, Catalunya, Spain (latitude 41.69, longitude 2.25) on 2017-05-28 using a sweep net. The specimen used for genome sequencing had ID SAN00002425 (ToLID ilThyActe1), while the specimen used for Hi-C sequencing had ID SAN00002426 (ToLID ilThyActe2). Both specimens were collected by Konrad Lohse (University of Edinburgh) and Alex Hayward (University of Exeter) and identified by Roger Vila (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Samples were snap frozen at –80 °C in a dry shipper.

The workflow for high molecular weight (HMW) DNA extraction at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI) Tree of Life Core Laboratory includes a sequence of core procedures: sample preparation; sample homogenisation, DNA extraction, fragmentation, and clean-up. In sample preparation, the ilThyActe1 sample was weighed and dissected on dry ice ( Jay et al., 2023). Tissue from the head was homogenised using a PowerMasher II tissue disruptor ( Denton et al., 2023a).

HMW DNA was extracted in the WSI Scientific Operations core using the Automated MagAttract v2 protocol ( Oatley et al., 2023). The DNA was sheared into an average fragment size of 12–20 kb in a Megaruptor 3 system with speed setting 31 ( Bates et al., 2023). Sheared DNA was purified by solid-phase reversible immobilisation ( Strickland et al., 2023): in brief, the method employs a 1.8X ratio of AMPure PB beads to sample to eliminate shorter fragments and concentrate the DNA. The concentration of the sheared and purified DNA was assessed using a Nanodrop spectrophotometer and Qubit Fluorometer and Qubit dsDNA High Sensitivity Assay kit. Fragment size distribution was evaluated by running the sample on the FemtoPulse system.

Protocols developed by the WSI Tree of Life laboratory are publicly available on protocols.io ( Denton et al., 2023b).

Sequencing

Pacific Biosciences HiFi circular consensus DNA sequencing libraries were constructed according to the manufacturers’ instructions. DNA sequencing was performed by the Scientific Operations core at the WSI on a Pacific Biosciences Sequel IIe instrument. Hi-C data were also generated from head tissue of ilThyActe2 using the Arima2 kit and sequenced on the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 instrument.

Genome assembly, curation and evaluation

Assembly was carried out with Hifiasm ( Cheng et al., 2021) and haplotypic duplication was identified and removed with purge_dups ( Guan et al., 2020). The assembly was then scaffolded with Hi-C data ( Rao et al., 2014) using YaHS ( Zhou et al., 2023). The assembly was checked for contamination and corrected as described previously ( Howe et al., 2021). Manual curation was performed using HiGlass ( Kerpedjiev et al., 2018) and PretextView ( Harry, 2022). The mitochondrial genome was assembled using MitoHiFi ( Uliano-Silva et al., 2023), which runs MitoFinder ( Allio et al., 2020) or MITOS ( Bernt et al., 2013) and uses these annotations to select the final mitochondrial contig and to ensure the general quality of the sequence.

A Hi-C map for the final assembly was produced using bwa-mem2 ( Vasimuddin et al., 2019) in the Cooler file format ( Abdennur & Mirny, 2020). To assess the assembly metrics, the k-mer completeness and QV consensus quality values were calculated in Merqury ( Rhie et al., 2020). This work was done using Nextflow ( Di Tommaso et al., 2017) DSL2 pipelines “sanger-tol/readmapping” ( Surana et al., 2023a) and “sanger-tol/genomenote” ( Surana et al., 2023b). The genome was analysed within the BlobToolKit environment ( Challis et al., 2020) and BUSCO scores ( Manni et al., 2021; Simão et al., 2015) were calculated.

Table 3 contains a list of relevant software tool versions and sources.

Table 3. Software tools: versions and sources.

Software tool	Version	Source	
BlobToolKit	4.2.1	https://github.com/blobtoolkit/blobtoolkit	
BUSCO	5.3.2	https://gitlab.com/ezlab/busco	
Hifiasm	0.16.1-r375	https://github.com/chhylp123/hifiasm	
HiGlass	1.11.6	https://github.com/higlass/higlass	
Merqury	MerquryFK	https://github.com/thegenemyers/MERQURY.FK	
MitoHiFi	2	https://github.com/marcelauliano/MitoHiFi	
PretextView	0.2	https://github.com/wtsi-hpag/PretextView	
purge_dups	1.2.3	https://github.com/dfguan/purge_dups	
sanger-tol/genomenote	v1.0	https://github.com/sanger-tol/genomenote	
sanger-tol/readmapping	1.1.0	https://github.com/sanger-tol/readmapping/tree/1.1.0	
YaHS	1.1a.2	https://github.com/c-zhou/yahs	

Genome annotation

The Ensembl Genebuild annotation system ( Aken et al., 2016) was used to generate annotation for the Thymelicus acteon assembly (GCA_951805285.1) in Ensembl Rapid Release at the EBI. Annotation was created primarily through alignment of transcriptomic data to the genome, with gap filling via protein-to-genome alignments of a select set of proteins from UniProt ( UniProt Consortium, 2019).

Wellcome Sanger Institute – Legal and Governance

The materials that have contributed to this genome note have been supplied by a Darwin Tree of Life Partner. The submission of materials by a Darwin Tree of Life Partner is subject to the ‘Darwin Tree of Life Project Sampling Code of Practice’, which can be found in full on the Darwin Tree of Life website here. By agreeing with and signing up to the Sampling Code of Practice, the Darwin Tree of Life Partner agrees they will meet the legal and ethical requirements and standards set out within this document in respect of all samples acquired for, and supplied to, the Darwin Tree of Life Project.

Further, the Wellcome Sanger Institute employs a process whereby due diligence is carried out proportionate to the nature of the materials themselves, and the circumstances under which they have been/are to be collected and provided for use. The purpose of this is to address and mitigate any potential legal and/or ethical implications of receipt and use of the materials as part of the research project, and to ensure that in doing so we align with best practice wherever possible. The overarching areas of consideration are:

•      Ethical review of provenance and sourcing of the material

•      Legality of collection, transfer and use (national and international)

Each transfer of samples is further undertaken according to a Research Collaboration Agreement or Material Transfer Agreement entered into by the Darwin Tree of Life Partner, Genome Research Limited (operating as the Wellcome Sanger Institute), and in some circumstances other Darwin Tree of Life collaborators.

Data availability

European Nucleotide Archive: Thymelicus acteon (Lulworth skipper). Accession number PRJEB59958; https://identifiers.org/ena.embl/PRJEB59958 ( Wellcome Sanger Institute, 2023). The genome sequence is released openly for reuse. The Thymelicus acteon genome sequencing initiative is part of the Darwin Tree of Life (DToL) project. All raw sequence data and the assembly have been deposited in INSDC databases. Raw data and assembly accession identifiers are reported in Table 1.

Author information

Members of the Wellcome Sanger Institute Tree of Life Management, Samples and Laboratory team are listed here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10066175.

Members of Wellcome Sanger Institute Scientific Operations: Sequencing Operations are listed here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10043364.

Members of the Wellcome Sanger Institute Tree of Life Core Informatics team are listed here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10066637.

Members of the Tree of Life Core Informatics collective are listed here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5013541.

Members of the Darwin Tree of Life Consortium are listed here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4783558.

10.21956/wellcomeopenres.23899.r94328
Reviewer response for version 1
Fan Xiaoling 1Referee
1 South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
11 9 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Fan X
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Version 1recommendationapprove
The type of species of the genus Thymelicus , T. acteo n, includes several subspecies. The study specifically focuses on the genomic sequencing of the nominate subspecies of T. acteon , based on the information available from the collected specimen.

The research only involves genomic sequencin, assembly, and annotation. These techniques are well-established in modern biological research. The genomic data obtained from the nominate subspecies will provide crucial insights into the taxonomic status of the species and its various subspecies within the genus. This study merits indexing if it meets the journal’s criteria.

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others?

Yes

Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?

Yes

Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

Yes

Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?

Yes

Reviewer Expertise:

Systematics of Hesperiidae

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

10.21956/wellcomeopenres.23899.r94329
Reviewer response for version 1
Wu Li-Wei 1Referee https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5254-0322

1 Tunghai University, Taichung City, Taiwan
9 9 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Wu LW
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Version 1recommendationapprove
This manuscript provides a genome information about the Lulworth skipper, Thymelicus acteon. The length of this male genome is 537 Mb in length, and total 28 chromosome-level pseudomolecules are assembled, including Z sex chromosome. The assembly quality, with an N50 of 19.7 Mb and a BUSCO completeness of 98.4%, indicates a highly complete genomic dataset.

The use of Pacific Biosciences HiFi long reads and Hi-C technology for assembly correction greatly enhances the utility of this genome for further studies in conservation genetics, evolution and phylogeography, making it an essential reference for future genomic analyses.

The analysis presented in this manuscript provides excellent genomic information. However, there are aspects of the background that could be enhanced to increase application of this manuscript and help readers, who interest this genome, understand the biology of the species more comprehensively. Two suggestions as follow: The second paragraph of the background section states, "but in the UK it has increased in abundance since 2014, possibly as a result of climate change." This claim should be supported by additional citations to clarify why the authors consider climate change a possible factor affecting the abundance of this skipper.

Regarding the mitochondrial genome, which has been assembled to a length of 17-Kb, it would be beneficial to provide the GenBank accession number. This would offer convenient public access to the data, allowing others to utilize this information directly (not just only the SRA datasets). Overall, these enhancements could solidify its usefulness and accessibility.

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others?

Yes

Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?

Yes

Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

Yes

Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?

Yes

Reviewer Expertise:

conservation genetics, phylogeny, historical biogeography

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

10.21956/wellcomeopenres.23899.r92909
Reviewer response for version 1
Pazhenkova Elena 1Referee https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5358-9301

1 University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
23 8 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Pazhenkova E
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Version 1recommendationapprove
The article presents a comprehensive genome assembly of the Lulworth Skipper, Thymelicus acteon (Lepidoptera, Hesperiidae). The authors constructed a high-quality assembly using data from PacBio HiFi long reads and Hi-C data. The resulting genome sequence spans 537 Mb, with an assembly of 28 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the Z sex chromosome. Additionally, the mitochondrial genome, spanning 17 Kb, has been assembled.

Gene annotation using Ensembl identified a total of 12813 protein-coding genes, providing valuable insights into the genetic makeup of the Lulworth Skipper. The study includes detailed taxonomic information, habitat description, and phenotypic variation across its range, enhancing the context of the research. The article also highlights the ecological significance and conservation status of the species.

Overall, this article provides a valuable resource for researchers interested in the biology of the Lulworth Skipper. The genome assembly presented in this study serves as a solid foundation for further investigations into the species' adaptation, population genomics, and conservation strategies. The comprehensive data provided makes this article an important contribution to the field of biodiversity research and genomics.

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others?

Yes

Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?

Yes

Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

Yes

Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?

Yes

Reviewer Expertise:

Entomology, conservation, evolutionary biology

I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
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