The genome sequence of the Brown Ash Ermine moth, Zelleria hepariella Stainton, 1849

We present a genome assembly from a male Zelleria hepariella (the Brown Ash Ermine; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Yponomeutidae). The genome sequence is 428.8 megabases in span. Most of the assembly is scaffolded into 19 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the Z sex chromosome. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 16.31 kilobases in length. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl identified 15,718 protein coding genes.


Background
Zelleria hepariella, Brown Ash Ermine is a micro-moth in the family Yponomeutidae.It is local throughout the UK, and is found throughout Europe (GBIF Secretariat, 2024).The chestnut brown adult (forewing length 5-7.5 mm) has a distinctive head-down resting posture with the tip of the forewings slightly curved which results in a hook-tipped appearance (Sterling et al., 2012), making the adult of this species relatively easy to identify.
Zellaria hepariella lays its eggs on ash or occasionally on privet, and the larvae feed at the tips of branches in a dense spinning of leaf-tips.There are often several larvae in each web (Emmet, 1996).The larvae pupate in July in a thick cocoon which is attached to a leaf of the host plant.The adult moth flies from July, spending the winter hibernating in dense vegetation such as yew or juniper, before emerging in the spring to mate (Langmaid et al., 2018).It comes to light.
The genome of Zelleria hepariella was sequenced as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project, a collaborative effort to sequence all the named eukaryotic species in the Atlantic Archipelago of Britain and Ireland.Here we present a chromosomally complete genome sequence for Zelleria hepariella based on a male specimen from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, UK.

Genome sequence report
The genome was sequenced from a male Zelleria hepariella (Figure 1) collected from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, UK (51.77, -1.34).A total of 35-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 187 missing joins or mis-joins and removed 79 haplotypic duplications, reducing the assembly length by 2.69% and the scaffold number by 24.58%.
The final assembly has a total length of 428.8 Mb in 180 sequence scaffolds with a scaffold N50 of 24.2 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 (98.92%) of the assembly sequence was assigned to 19 chromosomallevel scaffolds, representing 18 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).The Z chromosome was identified based on synteny with Yponomeuta sedellus (GCA_934045075.1)(Boyes et al., 2023).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 assembledand can be found as a contig within the multifasta file of the genome submission.

Sample acquisition and nucleic acid extraction
A specimen of Zelleria hepariella (specimen ID Ox000820, ToLID ilZelHepa1) was collected from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire (biological vice-county Berkshire), UK (latitude 51.77, longitude -1.34) on 2020-08-01.The specimen used for Hi-C sequencing (specimen ID Ox001820, ToLID ilZelHepa2) was collected from the same location on 2021-07-24.The   In sample preparation, the ilZelHepa1 sample was weighed and dissected on dry ice (Jay et al., 2023).The whole organism was homogenised using a PowerMasher II tissue disruptor (Denton et al., 2023a).HMW DNA was extracted using the Automated MagAttract v1 protocol (Sheerin et al., 2023).DNA was sheared into an average fragment size of 12-20 kb in a Megaruptor 3 system with speed setting 30 (Todorovic 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).
Table 3 contains a list of relevant software tool versions and sources.

Genome annotation
The BRAKER2 pipeline (Brůna et al., 2021) was used in the default protein mode to generate annotation for the Zelleria hepariella assembly (GCA_949319315.1) in Ensembl Rapid Release at the EBI.

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 The genome assembly presented here attained similar high-quality scores as the other six or so Yponomeutidae already available in Darwin's Tree of Life (DToL) gateway.As always with DToL reports, one misses a relational table about the whole contigs-to-scaffolds-to-chromosomes pipeline.I have no further comments except to point out that the sex of the specimens is stated as "not reported" on the species card at this https://links.tol.sanger.ac.uk/species/1594360, but in the text here is stated as "males".

Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described? Yes
Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?Yes

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Yes
Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?Yes Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Reviewer Expertise: Evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics 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.
Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?Yes Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?Yes

Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others? Yes
Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?Yes Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Reviewer Expertise: Lepidoptera genomics, Computational 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.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Genome assembly of Zelleria hepariella, ilZelHepa1.1: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 428,786,765 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 (40,238,452 bp, shown in red).Orange and pale-orange arcs show the N50 and N90 scaffold lengths (24,231,187 and 15,286,053 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/ilZelHepa1_1/dataset/ilZelHepa1_1/snail.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Genome assembly of Zelleria hepariella, ilZelHepa1.1: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/ilZelHepa1_1/dataset/ilZelHepa1_1/blob.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Genome assembly of Zelleria hepariella, ilZelHepa1.1:Hi-C contact map of the ilZelHepa1.1 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=co7Ic4K7QuSXBYHtqzFqNw.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Genome assembly of Zelleria hepariella, ilZelHepa1.1: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/ilZelHepa1_1/dataset/ilZelHepa1_1/cumulative.

Table 3 . Software tools: versions and sources. Software tool Version Source 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.