Metagenomic binning of PacBio HiFi data prior to assembly reveals a complete genome of Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar) (Coleopterea: Curculionidae, Dryophthorinae) the most damaging arthropod pest of bananas and plantains.

PacBio HiFi sequencing was employed in combination with metagenomic binning to produce a high-quality reference genome of Cosmopolites sordidus . We compared k-mer and alignment reference based pre-binning and post-binning approaches to remove contamination. We were also interested to know if the post-binning approach had interspersed bacterial contamination within intragenic regions of Arthropoda binned contigs. Our analyses identified 3,433 genes that were composed with reads identified as of putative bacterial origins. The pre-binning approach yielded a C. sordidus genome of 1.07 Gb genome composed of 3,089 contigs with 98.6% and 97.1% complete and single copy genome and protein BUSCO scores respectively. In this article we demonstrate that in this case the pre-binning approach does not sacrifice assembly quality for more stringent metagenomic filtering. We also determine post-binning allows for increased intragenic contamination increased with increasing coverage, but the frequency of gene contamination increased with lower coverage. Future work should focus on developing reference free pre-binning approaches for HiFi reads produced from eukaryotic based metagenomic samples.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
(© 2023 Rodriguez Ruiz and Van Dam.)