The genome sequence of the large yellow underwing, Noctua pronuba (Linnaeus, 1758)

We present a genome assembly from an individual female Noctua pronuba (the large yellow underwing; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Noctuidae). The genome sequence is 529 megabases in span. The complete assembly is scaffolded into 32 chromosomal pseudomolecules, with the W and Z sex chromosome assembled. The mitochondrial genome was also assembled and is 15.3 kilobases in length.


Background
Noctua pronuba (large yellow underwing) is a widespread noctuid moth found across Eurasia and North Africa, and one of the most familiar moths in the UK with hundreds of adults commonly caught in a single light trap. The larvae are polyphagous, feeding on a wide range of grasses and herbaceous plants, and have bright green colouration in early instars, changing to brown in later instars. The moth was recorded in Canada in 1979 and has spread south since its accidental introduction; N. pronuba is now an occasional pest of commercial crops in the United States, where the larvae are known as winter cutworm (Difonzo & Russell, 2010). In a major outbreak in Michigan in 2007, vast numbers of larvae caused defoliation of fields of alfalfa, rye, oat and winter wheat, and reached public nuisance proportions (Difonzo & Russell, 2010).
The forewings of the adult moth may be light brown, ochreous or dark-purplish brown, with colour controlled genetically through polymorphism at unknown loci modified by sex-linked genes (Cook & Sarsam, 1981). The hindwings, which are completely hidden at rest, are bright orange-yellow with a black band. When disturbed and the moth takes flight, the yellow hindwings are suddenly revealed, plausibly acting as 'flash colouration' to startle predators. In Europe, N. pronuba is a strongly migratory species: vertical-looking entomological radars sited in the UK have detected large numbers of individuals flying north in spring or south in autumn (Chapman et al., 2010). Indeed, in experiments using moths tethered to a flight mill N. pronuba was found to be one of the most mobile noctuid species as measured by both maximum flight speed and total distance covered in one night (Jones et al., 2015). Migration direction is thought to be affected by use of magnetic compass sense, coupled with the ability to detect and utilise favourably-directed winds (Baker & Mather, 1982;Reynolds et al., 2010).
The genome of N. pronuba was sequenced as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project, a collaborative effort to sequence all of the named eukaryotic species in the Atlantic Archipelago of Britain and Ireland. Here we present a chromosomally complete genome sequence for N. pronuba, based on one female specimen from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, UK.

Genome sequence report
The genome was sequenced from a single female N. pronuba collected from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, UK (latitude 51.772, longitude -1.338) (Figure 1). A total of 47-fold coverage in Pacific Biosciences single-molecule HiFi long reads and 71-fold coverage in 10X Genomics read clouds were generated. Primary assembly contigs were scaffolded with chromosome conformation Hi-C data. Manual assembly curation corrected 21 missing/misjoins and removed 6 haplotypic duplications, reducing the assembly length by 0.02% and the scaffold number by 25.76%, and increasing the scaffold N50 by 1.57%.
The final assembly has a total length of 529 Mb in 49 sequence scaffolds with a scaffold N50 of 17.9 Mb (Table 1). Of the assembly sequence, 99.89% was assigned to 32 chromosomal-level scaffolds, representing 30 autosomes    Hi-C data were generated from remaining whole organism tissue using the Arima Hi-C v2 kit and sequenced on HiSeq X.