High-quality genome assembly of channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus.

Background The channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus), a species native to North America, is one of the most important commercial freshwater fish in the world, especially in the United States’ aquaculture industry. Since its introduction into China in 1984, both cultivation area and yield of this species have been dramatically increased such that China is now the leading producer of channel catfish. To aid genomic research in this species, data sets such as genetic linkage groups, long-insert libraries, physical maps, bacterial artificial clones (BAC) end sequences (BES), transcriptome assemblies, and reference genome sequences have been generated. Here, using diverse assembly methods, we provide a comparable high-quality genome assembly for a channel catfish from a breeding stock inbred in China for more than three generations, which was originally imported to China from North America.