Genome Report: De novo genome assembly and annotation for the Taita white-eye (Zosterops silvanus)

The Taita White-eye (Zosterops silvanus) is an endangered songbird endemic to the Taita Hills of Southern Kenya, where it is confined to small areas of fragmented forest. With diversification rates exceeding those reported in most other vertebrates, White-eyes are a prime example of a great speciator. Nevertheless, we still know surprisingly little about the genomic underpinnings leading to this extraordinary fast radiation. Here, we present a draft genome assembly (ZSil_MB_1.0) for the Taita White-eye generated from a blood sample of a wild, female bird captured in the Taita Hills, Kenya. By performing a de novo assembly with linked-reads and annotation of the assembly with the MAKER pipeline, we generated a 1.069 Gb assembly with a scaffold N50 of 1.105 Mb and an L50 of 244. After quality evaluation of the assembly, we identified 92.1% of BUSCOs complete or fragmented, indicating that our de novo assembly is of high quality. This new assembly provides a genomic resource for future studies into the evolutionary and comparative genomics of this rapidly diversifying group of birds.