This week we are releasing a genome assembly for the golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos. The golden eagle is North America's largest bird of prey, and a protected species in the United States.
The chromosome-length assembly is based on the draft from (Van Den Bussche et al., 2017), an important resource for population genomic studies in golden eagles. The sample for Hi-C library preparation used for the upgrade was donated by a female named Bonnie at the Texas State Aquarium.
Check out the alignments against the chicken genome assembly to understand how chromosomes of the golden eagle relate to those of other bird species in the DNA Zoo collection. While we've seen a lot of birds (and non-avian reptiles) displaying a highly conservative karyotype (see, for example, our blog post about the prairie chicken and the band-tailed pigeon), the golden eagle genome tells a very different story, with extensive rearrangements.
