Plant & Animal Genomes XVI Conference

January 12-16, 2008
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

454 Sequencing And SNP Discovery In Sheep: Project Design And Interim Results

John C. McEwan¹ , Richard Gibbs² , George Weinstock² , Gemma M. Payne¹ , V. Hutton Oddy³ , Frank W. Nicholas⁴ , Brian P. Dalrymple⁵ , International Sheep Genomics Consortia⁶

¹  AgResearch, Invermay Agricultural Centre PB 50034, Mosgiel, NZ

²  BCM-Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA

³  University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia

⁴  University of Sydney, Camden, NSW 2570, Australia

⁵  CSIRO Livestock Industries, Brisbane, Queensland 4067, Australia

⁶  http://www.sheephapmap.org

A project design will be outlined to create a sheep genome assembly that covers most of the unique fraction of the sheep genome which represents 60% of the total ovine genome^†. The project is also expected to identify 180,000 positioned ovine SNPs suitable for inclusion in a 60K SNP chip. The project is sequencing 6 female sheep each to 0.5X genome coverage using shotgun libraries on the Roche 454 FLX platform. The animals consist of Romney, Texel, Scottish Blackface, Merino, Dorset and Awassi breeds. Consideration is being given to also using reduced representational sequencing to identify SNPs with better estimates of minor allele frequency. Progress and interim results will be presented.
^†John C. McEwan et al. Using Roche 454 FLX sequencing for SNP discovery in sheep PAG XVI