Raw se-quence reads were quality-filtered based on the following criteria:(i) reads containing no ambiguous bases (Ns); (ii) reads comprising at least 400 bp; (iii) reads containing ≤6 homopolymers; and (iv) reads
achieving average quality scores ≥25 within any 50-bp sequence. Our
data contained both forward and reverse sequences; therefore, reverse
sequences were reversed and merged with forward sequences.