The black flying fox, Pteropus alecto, is a megabat in the family Pteropodidae. Members of the genus Pteropus include the largest bats in the world. The Pteropus genus currently has about 57 recognised species. The genus is primarily an island taxon, with 55 species having some or all of their distribution on islands.
We applied a whole genome shotgun strategy and next-generation sequencing technologies using an Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform to sequence the genome of an individual adult male P. alecto. In order to lower the risk of non-randomness, we constructed 26 paired-end libraries sequenced on 26 lanes, with insert sizes of about 250 base pairs (bp), 500 bp, 800 bp, 2 kb, 5 kb, 10 kb and 20 kb. In total, we generated about 219.7 Gb (109.8x coverage) of high quality sequence for the assembly. The genome was de novo assembled by SOAPdenovo. The final total contig size and N50 were 1.99 Gb and 25.7 kb, respectively. The total scaffold size and N50 were 2.03 Gb and 15.8 Mb, respectively.

Read the peer-reviewed publication(s):

Zhang, G., Cowled, C., Shi, Z., Huang, Z., Bishop-Lilly, K. A., Fang, X., … Wang, J. (2012). Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity. Science, 339(6118), 456–460. doi:10.1126/science.1230835 (PubMed: 23258410)

Accessions (data included in GigaDB):

GEO: GSM1048080
SRA: SRS378032