Bekavac, M.; Coimbra, R.; Busa, V. F.; Behm, M.; Wagner, R. E.; Goncalves, A.; Begall, S.; Frye, M.; Odom, D. T.

Ansell\'s mole-rat (Fukomys anselli) is an African rodent known for its subterranean lifestyle and unique phenotypic traits, including extreme longevity, magnetoreception, and a cooperative breeding social structure. Efforts to dissect the genetic architecture of these traits and to decipher their phylogenetic relationships within the broader African mole-rat family would greatly benefit from a reference-grade genome. Here, we report a first genome assembly of a male Ansell\'s mole-rat. By combining Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) long-reads and Illumina short-reads with Hi-C data, we generated a chromosome level assembly with a total length of 2.27 Gb, 412 scaffolds and a scaffold N50 of 72.4 Mb. We identified 99.54% of expected genes and annotated 29,094 transcripts using RNA sequencing data. This high-quality de novo genome of Fukomys anselli lays the foundation for dissecting the genetic and evolutionary basis of its extraordinary traits and resolving African mole-rat phylogeny.