Plant & Animal Genomes XVIII Conference

January 9-13, 2010
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

The Latest High-Quality Bovine Genome Assembly, UMD Bos taurus 3.0.

Aleksey V Zimin¹ , Daniela Puiu² , Guillaume Marcais¹ , Arthur Delcher² , James A Yorke¹ , Steven L Salzberg²

¹  IPST, CSS Building 224, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

²  CBCB, Biomolecular Sciences Building 296, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

We report on our latest progress in creating the best possible assembly of the genome of the domestic cow, Bos taurus, from the existing NCBI Trace Archive data.
In April 2009 our group has published the results of the first ever mammalian genome re-assembly project the Bos taurus UMD 2.0 (UMD2). The UMD2 assemvbly is now available from Genbank and has been annotated by NCBI. In the beginning of 2009, building on the experience that we gained in building the UMD2, using the latest Celera Assembler 5.2, and our recently developed sequence mapping software, we started a major re-build of the assembly. The new assembly, that we called UMD Bos taurus 3.0 (UMD3) was finished in August 2009 and is currently available from our site http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/research/bos_taurus_assembly.shtml This assembly is more contiguous and more complete, with 2.64 billion base pairs (bp) mapped to the chromosomes, an increase of over 30Mbp over the UMD2. The N50 contig size increased to 103Kbp. Most local small contig rearrangements were resolved. THe UMD3 version is currently the best draft assembly of the Bos taurus genome.