Appendix 1—figure 1. Characteristics of the whale shark genome assembly by k-mer profiling of raw Illumina reads by GenomeScope.

GenomeScope fits a model to estimate genome parameters including heterozygosity (het), an estimated genome size (len), the unique proportion of the genome (uniq; as opposed to the remainder which would be repetitive genome length). Profiling of k-mers reveals high coverage sequencing as well as low heterozygosity. Consistent with low heterozygosity, most of the k-mers form one peak centered around roughly 40× coverage, and do not form another peak centered at roughly half the coverage that would represent k-mers arising from heterozygous alleles.