Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Improved Assembly Of The Bos taurus Genome

Aleksey Zimin¹ , Arthur Delcher² , Liliana Florea² , Finnian Hahrahan² , David Kelley² , Guillaume Marcais¹ , Michael Roberts¹ , Michael Schatz² , Poorani Subramanian¹ , Steven Salzberg² , James Yorke¹

¹  Institute for Physical Science and Technology Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

²  Center for Bioinformatics and Computational, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

The genome of the cow (Bos taurus) was recently sequenced and assembled by the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Human Genome Sequencing Center. The BCM's latest draft is called Btau4.0. We produced an independent assembly from the public Trace Archive Data using a variety of methods, including the Celera Assembler, the UMD Overlapper, and additional assembly debugging, mapping, and improvement tools. We used publicly available map data to map the scaffolds onto the chromosomes. Our latest draft is called UMD_Freeze_2.0 to be released in November 2008. UMD_Freeze_2.0 places almost 7% more sequence onto the chromosomes, as compared to Btau4.0, and fixes a number of large inversions/omissions in Btau4.0 that have been independently verified by our collaborators. In this talk the two assemblies will be compared on a variety of criteria including quantitative measures, agreement with the published maps, and amount of coding sequence present. Procedures used to create the assembly and map the assembled scaffolds onto the chromosomes will be described briefly. Our assembly is publicly available and is posted on our ftp site
ftp://ftp.cbcb.umd.edu/pub/data/assembly/Bos_taurus/