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Background: The yellow mealworm beetle, Tenebrio molitor, is a promising alternative protein source for animal and human nutrition and its farming involves relatively low environmental costs. For these reasons, its industrial scale production started this century. However, to optimize and breed sustainable new T. molitor lines, the access to its genome remains essential. Methods: By combining Oxford Nanopore and Illumina Hi-C data, we constructed a high-quality chromosome-scale assembly of T. molitor. Then, we combined RNA-seq data and available coleoptera proteomes for gene prediction with GMOVE. Results: We produced a high-quality genome with a N50 = 21.9Mb with a completeness of 99.5% and predicted 21,435 genes with a median size of 1,780 bp. Gene orthology between T. molitor and Tribolium castaneum showed a highly conserved synteny between the two coleoptera and paralogs search revealed an expansion of histones in the T. molitor genome. Conclusions: The present genome will greatly help fundamental and applied research such as genetic breeding and will contribute to the sustainable production of the yellow mealworm.

H3K9me3 and H3K27me3 chromatin silencing marks are usually deposited by different SET-domain proteins. Here the authors show that the Enhancer-of-zeste-like protein Ezl1, from the unicellular eukaryote Paramecium tetraurelia, catalyzes methylation of histone H3 in vitro and in vivo with an apparent specificity toward K9 and K27, and controls the repression of transposable elements.