Research overview: progress in cat and felid genome assemblies

Since the first lightly sequenced domestic cat genome, feline genomics has advanced to highly contiguous, chromosome-level assemblies for the domestic cat and an expanding set of wild species. This overview surveys the improvement from short-read drafts to long-read and reference-quality genomes, the assembly of tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, cheetahs, pumas, and others, and the value of these resources for conservation, disease mapping, and comparative biology. It discusses how better assemblies reveal structural variation, repetitive elements, and regulatory regions previously hidden, and how coordinated efforts aim to sequence representatives of every felid lineage to support family-wide comparative genomics.