Since the opening of the Rhine-Main-Danube-Channel, four goby species are known to have invaded the River Rhine. Of these, the most recent and numerous is the Caucasian Dwarf Goby, which has been found in the Rhine since 2019. This study presents a new high-quality genome for this species (Knipowitschia cf. caucasica) (Schoenle et al. 2024). Currently, chromosome-scale genome assemblies represent a key first step in invasion biology, allowing the reconstruction of a species’ invasion history and monitoring its progress, as well as identifying and characterizing candidate genes that control invasiveness (McCartney et al. 2019). 

The authors sequenced the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of this species using state-of-the art methods including long-read sequencing techniques, scaffolded based on chromatin conformation data, and annotated using both direct transcriptomic and protein homology evidence. Data analyses follow currently established pipelines for genome assembly, scaffolding, annotation, and downstream bioinformatic analyses. The quality of the final genome was thoroughly assessed and conforms to what is expected from other genomes of fishes in the family Gobiidae. This study follows other recent endeavors that generated high-quality genomes to improve our understanding of invasion biology (e.g. Shao et al. 2020 and Kitsoulis et al. 2023). These studies are successfully contributing to increasing the genomic resources for the world’s most damaging invasive species, which were not available for even a third of the top 100 invasive species just five years ago (McCarthy et al. 2019). Beyond invasion biology, the Dwarf Goby genome is also an important resource for many other applications, including evolutionary genomic analyses and phylogeography of this species and closely related ones in their native ranges.

                
References          

Kitsoulis CV, Papadogiannis V, Kristoffersen JB, Kaitetzidou E, Sterioti A, Tsigenopoulos CS, Manousaki T (2023) Near-chromosome level genome assembly of devil firefish, Pterois miles. Peer Community Journal 3:e64. https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.295  

McCartney MA, Mallez S, Gohl DM (2019) Genome projects in invasion biology. Conservation Genetics 20:1201–1222. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-019-01224-x

Schoenle A, Guiglielmoni N, Mainz T, Greve C, Hamadou AB, Heermann L, Borcherding J, Waldvogel A-M (2024) Chromosome level genome reference of the Caucasian dwarf goby Knipowitschia cf. caucasica, a new alien Gobiidae invading the River Rhine. bioRxiv, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Genomics. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.22.590508

Shao F, Ludwig A, Mao Y, Liu N, Peng Z (2020). Chromosome-level genome assembly of the female western mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis). GigaScience 9:giaa092. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giaa092