Improved genomic resources for the black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon)

Abstract World production of farmed crustaceans was 7.8 million tons in 2016. While only making up approximately 10% of world aquaculture production, crustaceans are generally high-value species and can earn significant export income for producing countries. Viet Nam is a major seafood producing country earning USD 7.3 billion in 2016 in export income with shrimp as a major commodity. However, there is a general lack of genomic resources available for shrimp species, which is challenging to obtain due to the need to deal with large repetitive genomes, which characterize many decapod crustaceans. The first tiger prawn (P. monodon) genome assembly was assembled in 2016 using the standard Illumina PCR-based pair-end reads and a computationally-efficient but relatively suboptimal assembler, SOAPdenovo v2. As a result, the current P. monodon draft genome is highly fragmented (> 2 million scaffolds with N50 length of