Genomic architecture of the pole borer, <i>Neandra brunnea</i> (Cerambycidae: Parandrinae) <i>,</i> sheds light on the evolution of wood-feeding in longhorn beetles

Neandra brunnea, commonly known as the pole borer, is a species of wood-boring (xylophagous) longhorn beetle (family Cerambycidae) found throughout most of eastern North America. We sequenced, assembled and annotated the genome of N. brunnea and compared it to publicly available genomes of other Cerambycidae. The 1.23 Gb N. brunnea genome assembly was distributed across 78 contigs, with an N50 of 38.88 Mb and largest contig of 74.28 Mb. Most of the genome was comprised of repetitive sequences, with 81.39% comprising interspersed repeats. Most (99.7%) of the expected orthologous genes (BUSCOs) were present and fully assembled, with only 2.5 % duplicated. The genome annotation identified 13,003 genes (15,574 transcripts), including 301 putative horizontally transferred loci from a diversity of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic donors. The assembled mitochondrial genome is relatively large at 17 kb and shows an unusual repeating array of d-loop segments. As the first representative of the longhorn beetle subfamily Parandrinae with a sequenced genome, N. brunnea provides an important new point of reference for the comparative study of beetle genomes and a further resource for studies of the evolution and genomic basis of xylophagy.