Red-bellied piranha assembly and gene annotation

The red-bellied piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri) is a species of piranha native to South America, found in the Amazon, Paraguay, Paraná and Essequibo basins, as well as coastal rivers of northeastern Brazil. Despite the piranha’s reputation as a dangerous carnivore, it is primarily a scavenger and forager, and will mainly eat plants and insects during the rainy season when food is abundant.

Assembly

The Pygocentrus_nattereri-1.0.2 assembly was submitted by McDonnell Genome Institute on July 2016. The assembly is on scaffold level, consisting of 325,620 contigs assembled into 283,518 scaffolds. The N50 size is the length such that 50% of the assembled genome lies in blocks of the N50 size or longer. The N50 length for the contigs is 57,732 while the scaffold N50 is 1,440,044.

Gene annotation

The gene annotation process was carried out using a combination of protein-to-genome alignments, annotation mapping from a suitable reference species and RNA-seq alignments (where RNA-seq data with appropriate meta data were publicly available). For each candidate gene region, a selection process was applied to choose the most appropriate set of transcripts based on evolutionary distance, experimental evidence for the source data and quality of the alignments. Small ncRNAs were obtained using a combination of BLAST and Infernal/RNAfold. Pseudogenes were calculated by looking at genes with a large percentage of non-biological introns (introns of <10bp), where the gene was covered in repeats, or where the gene was single exon and evidence of a functional multi-exon paralog was found elsewhere in the genome. lincRNAs were generated via RNA-seq data where no evidence of protein homology or protein domains could be found in the transcript.

• Detailed information on fish clade genebuild (PDF)

In accordance with the Fort Lauderdale Agreement, please check the publication status of the genome/assembly before publishing any genome-wide analyses using these data.

More information

General information about this species can be found in Wikipedia.