Credit: Genome 10K Project
Study Take-Aways Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease.
o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies.
o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects a quantum leap in precision sequence details and discovery.
FORT LAUDERDALE/DAVIE, Fla. - Two decades ago, the full genome sequence of humankind was released. It was funded by international government and philanthropic sources at a cost of billions of dollars.
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The Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) today announces their flagship study and associated publications focused on genome assembly quality and standardization for the field of genomics. This study includes 16 diploid high-quality, near error-free, and near complete vertebrate reference genome assemblies for species across all taxa with backbones (i.e., mammals, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and fishes) from five years of piloting the first phase of the VGP project.
Nature, with companion papers simultaneously published in other scientific journals, the VGP details numerous technological improvements based on these 16 genome assemblies. In the flagship study, the VGP demonstrates the feasibility of setting and achieving high-quality reference genome quality metrics using their state-of-the-art automated approach of combining long-read and long-range chromosome scaffolding approaches with novel algorithms that put the pieces of the genome assembly puzzle together.