The goat (Capra hircus) remains an important livestock species due to the species’ ability to forage and provide milk, meat and wool in arid environments. The current goat reference assembly and annotation borrows heavily from other loosely related livestock species, such as cattle, and may not reflect the unique structural and functional characteristics of the species. We present preliminary data from a new de novo reference assembly for goat that primarily utilizes 38 million PacBio P5-C3 reads generated from an inbred San Clemente goat. This assembly consists of only 5,902 contigs with a contig N50 size of 2.56 megabases which…
Generating de novo reference genome assemblies for non-model organisms is a laborious task that often requires a large amount of data from several sequencing platforms and cytogenetic surveys. By using PacBio sequence data and new library creation techniques, we present a de novo, high quality reference assembly for the goat (Capra hircus) that demonstrates a primarily sequencing-based approach to efficiently create new reference assemblies for Eukaryotic species. This goat reference genome was created using 38 million PacBio P5-C3 reads generated from a San Clemente goat using the Celera Assembler PBcR pipeline with PacBio read self-correction. In order to generate the…
Goat is an important source of milk, meat, and fiber, especially in developing countries. An advantage of goats as livestock is the low maintenance requirements and high adaptability compared to other milk producers. The global population of domestic goats exceeds 800 million. In Africa, goat production is characterized by low productivity levels, and attempts to introduce more productive breeds have met with poor success due in part to nutritional constraints. It has been suggested that incorporation of selective breeding within the herds adapted for survival could represent one approach to improving food security across Africa. A recently produced genome assembly…
Goats are specialized in dairy, meat and fiber production, being adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions and having a large economic impact in developing countries. In the last years, there have been dramatic advances in the knowledge of the structure and diversity of the goat genome/transcriptome and in the development of genomic tools, rapidly narrowing the gap between goat and related species such as cattle and sheep. Major advances are: 1) publication of a de novo goat genome reference sequence; 2) Development of whole genome high density RH maps, and; 3) Design of a commercial 50K SNP array.…
The domestic goat (Capra hircus) is an important ruminant species both as a source of antibody-based reagents for research and biomedical applications and as an economically important animal for agriculture, particularly for developing nations that maintain most of the global goat population. Characterization of the loci encoding the goat immune repertoire would be highly beneficial for both vaccine and immune reagent development. However, in goat and other species whose reference genomes were generated using short-read sequencing technologies, the immune loci are poorly assembled as a result of their repetitive nature. Our recent construction of a long-read goat genome assembly (ARS1)…
The decrease in sequencing cost and increased sophistication of assembly algorithms for short-read platforms has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of species with genome assemblies. However, these assemblies are highly fragmented, with many gaps, ambiguities, and errors, impeding downstream applications. We demonstrate current state of the art for de novo assembly using the domestic goat (Capra hircus) based on long reads for contig formation, short reads for consensus validation, and scaffolding by optical and chromatin interaction mapping. These combined technologies produced what is, to our knowledge, the most continuous de novo mammalian assembly to date, with chromosome-length…
The newly described de novo goat genome sequence is the most contiguous diploid vertebrate assembly generated thus far using whole-genome assembly and scaffolding methods. The contiguity of this assembly is approaching that of the finished human and mouse genomes and suggests an affordable roadmap to high-quality references for thousands of species.
Three years ago, Erich Jarvis helped mastermind a massive DNA sequenc- ing effort that netted genomes for more than 40 bird species and produced a better avian family tree. But when he tried to compare the avian genomes to those of other species to learn about the evolution and function of several key brain genes, he was stymied. His team found that gene sequences from most of the comparison species—even humans—were incomplete, missing, or misplaced in the larger genome. The group had to resequence sections of sev- eral genomes to get the needed data, delaying their project many months.
Mycoplasma yeatsii is a goat mycoplasma species that, although an obligate parasite, accommodates this lifestyle as an inapparent commensalist. High-frequency transformation has also been reported for this species. The complete 895,051-bp genome sequence of strain GM274B has been determined, enabling an analysis of the features of this potential cloning host. Copyright © 2015 Calcutt et al.
Here we report the genome sequencess of four Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis strains. These include a strain isolated from a patient with C. pseudotuberculosis pneumonia (48252), a strain isolated from pus in goat (Ft_2193/67), a laboratory strain originating from strain Ft_2193/67 (CS_10), and the draft genome of an equine reference strain, CCUG 27541. Copyright © 2014 Håvelsrud et al.
The investigation of genetic diversity at molecular level has been proposed as a valuable complement and sometimes proxy to phenotypic diversity of local breeds and is presently considered as one of the FAO priorities for breed characterization. By recommending a set of selected molecular markers for each of the main livestock species, FAO has promoted the meta-analysis of local datasets, to achieve a global view of molecular genetic diversity. Analysis within the EU Globaldiv project of two large goat microsatellite datasets produced by the Econogene Consortium and the IAEA CRP–Asia Consortium, respectively, has generated a picture of goat diversity across…