The American shad (Alosa sapidissima) is a species of anadromous clupeid fish (born in fresh water, but live as adults in salt water), distributed on the North American coast of the North Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Florida. They were common food for European colonist of the Eastern United States (source Wikipedia). This sample was collected from an adult female by Reid Hyle for Nina Overgaard Therkildsen, from the St. Johns River, Florida, USA , and used to generate a high-quality reference genome assembly for the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Sequencing and genome assembly were conducted in the Vertebrate Genomes Lab, at the Rockefeller University, coordinated by Olivier Fedrigo and Erich D. Jarvis. The raw data and assembly are currently under a G10K-VGP publication embargo until removed from this description, following the G10K data use policy at the following URL: https://genome10k.soe.ucsc.edu/about/data_use_policy.