Onthophagus taurus
Table of Contents
Overview

The dung beetle genus Onthophagus comprises with over 2,400 extant species the most speciose genus within the animal kingdom. O. taurus itself is the most studied dung beetle and a focal taxon for studies in evolutionary ecology, evolutionary genetics, behavioral ecology, evo-devo and developmental genetics.
Like many species within the genus it features extreme secondary sexual traits (horns) and extreme sexual dimorphism (cued by sex-specific development). At the same time this species possesses an equally remarkable (and representative) male dimorphism (cued entirely by larval nutrition) in which large males express huge horns which they use as weapons in male combat, whereas small males remain hornless, non-aggressive, and instead invest into enlarged testes and ejaculates.
Onthophagus beetle are emerging as a model system in evodevo and ecodevo, in particular with respect to the evolutionary developmental genetics of plasticity, pattern formation, trait integration, and growth regulation. Extensive transcriptomic data already exist for this as well as other species, alongside a growing number of functional studies using larval RNAi-mediated transcript depletion, which works easily and routinely across diverse species within the genus.
Data were generated by the Baylor College of Medicine's i5k pilot project.
View the Baylor College of Medicine's data sharing policy.
Assembly Information
- Analysis Name
- Whole genome assembly of Onthophagus taurus
- Software
- Baylor College of Medicine genome assembly pipeline (NA)
- Source
- Otaur.scaffolds.fa
- Date performed
- 2014-01-29
- Materials & Methods
Sequence generation for assembly. For this project we are generating fairly high coverage in a number of different insert sized libraries. The assembly strategy is based around a seed allpaths assembly (the Broad Allpaths assembler) followed by seed assembly improvement using homegrown tools, Atlas-link and Atlas-GapFill, which can significantly improve the results. Thus we generate sequence data to enable the Allpaths assembly. As of Nov 2011 this is: - 40X genome coverage in 180bp insert library (100bp reads forward and reverse); and 40X 3kb insert data. To enable better scaffolding and local gap filling we additionally generate 500bp, 1kb, 2kb, and 8kb insert sizes at > 20X coverage.
Source: Baylor College of Medicine i5K Project Summary
Assembly Metrics
- Contig N50
- 15427
- Scaffold N50
- 251443
- GC Content
- 32.21
Data Files
Name | Last modified | Size | |
---|---|---|---|
![]() | Parent Directory | ||
![]() | BCM-After-Atlas | 2015-03-19 13:42 | |
![]() | Current Genome Assembly | 2015-03-19 13:42 |