GNAS2009 Abstract #10 - Cockett, Noelle
Assembly of the Ovine Whole Genome Reference Sequence
N. E. Cockett1, B. P. Dalrymple2, J. McEwan3, C. Wu1, J. Kijas2, J. F. Maddox4, F. Nicholas5, H. Oddy6, H. Raadsma5, C. Wade5, T. Goldammer7, A. Archibald8 and R. Gibbs9
1Utah State University (USA), 2CSIRO Livestock Industries (Australia), 3AgResearch (New Zealand), 4University of Melbourne (Australia), 5University of Sydney (Australia), 6University of New England (Australia), 7Research Institute of the Biology for Farm Animals (Germany), 8The Roslin Institute (UK), and 9Baylor College of Medicine-Human Genome Sequencing Center (USA).
A recently initiated project by the International Sheep Genome Consortium outlines the development of a high quality reference sequence assembly for sheep. The reference sequence will be equivalent to approximately 7X coverage Sanger sequencing, have an error rate of less than one base pair in 10,000, and have a minimal number of gaps. Sequence data will be generated from a single reference animal using short paired-end read technologies on multiple high-throughput sequencing platforms. Assembly of the sequences will be iterative, starting with de-novo assembly into high quality contigs and continuing with information from syntenic alignments to the human, bovine, dog and horse whole genome sequences. Information from the ovine linkage, RH and cytogenetic maps and positional information from the ovine consensus genome assembly will also be utilized in the assembly of the first draft of the reference sequence. Problem areas will be finished by sequencing BAC clones that cover large gaps and array-based hybridization enrichment across short gaps. At the conclusion of this project, a comprehensive reference sequence assembly will be generated using all available sequence data from the reference animal. The reference sequence and the consensus genome assembly will available to the scientific community with unrestricted access through a designated portal. The resulting ovine whole genome reference sequence will accelerate searches for genetic regions and genes influencing phenotypes in sheep, and combined with the bovine genome reference sequence, will serve as a backbone for other ruminant species. The assembly will also be a genomic resource for ovine biomedical research models.
