Abstract
Mussels of order Unionida are a group of strictly freshwater bivalves
with nearly 1,000 described species, with a dispersed geographic
distribution across the world’s freshwater ecosystems. Despite their
fundamental ecological importance, they are highly threatened, being the
faunal group with the highest records of wild extinctions. To date, only
five freshwater mussel species have had their whole genome sequenced, of
which only two are from European species. Here, we present the first
genome assembly of the painter’s mussel, Unio pictorum (Linnaeus,
1758), the type species representative of the order and the most
widespread species of the genus in Europe. We used long-read PacBio HiFi
sequencing reads to produce a highly contiguous assembly that will pave
the way for the study of European freshwater mussels in the Genome Era.