Improving the genome assembly of rabbits with long-read sequencing
Yiqin Bai1, Weili Lin2, Jie Xu3
1State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Abstract:
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is important as a biomedical model given its unique features in immunity and metabolism. The current reference genome OryCun2.0 established with whole-genome shotgun sequencing was quite fragmented and had not been updated for ten years. In this work, we provided a new rabbit genome assembly UM_NZW_1.0 to improve OryCun2.0 by leveraging the contig lengths based on long-read sequencing and a wealth of available Illumina paired-end sequence data. UM_NZW_1.0 showed a remarkable increase of continuity compared with OryCun2.0, with 5 times longer contig N50 and approximately 75% gaps closed. Many of the closed gaps were overlapped with protein-coding genes or transcriptional features, resulting in an enhancement of gene annotations. In particular, UM_NZW_1.0 presented a more complete landscape of the MHC region and the IGH locus, therefore provided a valuable resource for future researches on rabbits.
Related Concept Videos
Genome Annotation and Assembly
RNA-seq
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while...
Next-generation Sequencing
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features....


