The Italian sparrow is a hybrid species between house sparrow and spanish sparrow. Interestingly, the proportion of each parental genome differs among different populations of italian sparrow throughout the mediterranean islands. This presentes an opportunity to study the evolution of reproductive isolation, speciation and gene regulation. In our project we will be assembling several population specific genomes for the italian sparrow and then generate a pangenome which will represent all the variation within and between populations of the species. This will enable later gene expression analysis, improved genotyping and genome wide association studies.