The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus, SCHREBER 1775) is a large felid and is considered the fastest land animal. Historically, it inhabited open grassland across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwestern Asia; however, only small and fragmented populations remain today. Here, we present a de novo genome assembly of the cheetah based on PacBio continuous long reads and Hi-C proximity ligation data. The final assembly (VMU_Ajub_asm_v1.0) has a total length of 2.38 Gb, of which 99.7% are anchored into the expected 19 chromosome-scale scaffolds. The contig and scaffold N50 values of 96.8 Mb and 144.4 Mb, respectively, a BUSCO completeness of 95.4% and a k-mer completeness of 98.4%, emphasize the high quality of the assembly. Furthermore, annotation of the assembly identified 23,622 genes and a repeat content of 40.4%. This new highly contiguous and chromosome-scale assembly will greatly benefit conservation and evolutionary genomic analyses and will be a valuable resource, e.g., to gain a detailed understanding of the function and diversity of immune response genes in felids.

Central European Institute of Technology University of Veterinary Sciences Brno Brno Czech Republic

Department of Animal Genetics University of Veterinary Sciences Brno Czech Republic

Ecology and Genetics Research Unit University of Oulu Oulu Finland

Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Vienna Austria

LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics Frankfurt am Main Germany

Natural History Museum Vienna Central Research Laboratories Vienna Austria

Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna Vienna Austria

South African National Biodiversity Institute National Zoological Garden Pretoria South Africa

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