From wild animals to perfect pets, dogs have undergone some interesting changes during their centuries-long domestication. Intent on unraveling some of the developmental secrets of the process, a team of scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, is doing deep dives into the genomes of a range of canine cousins along the evolutionary chain. A desert dingo named Sandy has already provided some insight into the process after its genome was sequenced as part of the 2017 Plant and Animal SMRT Grant. Study leader Bill Ballard described in this presentation at PAG 2018 that pure dingoes…
The Mexican salamander, or the axolotl, may have tiny feet, but the feat of decoding its genetic footprint was huge—32 billion base pairs huge, making it ten times bigger than the human genome and the largest ever sequenced. The accomplishment by an international team of scientists is significant, not only because of its sheer size, but also because of the insights it could provide into tissue regeneration. The easily recognizable critter has an astounding ability to regenerate body parts, growing lost limbs – bones, muscles, nerves and all – within weeks. It can also repair spinal cord and retinal tissue,…
Maize is amazingly diverse. A study comparing genome segments from two inbred lines, for instance, revealed that half of the sequence and one-third of the gene content was not shared – that’s more diversity within the species than between some other species, for example humans and chimpanzees, which exhibit more than 98 percent sequence similarity. So how can researchers and commercial breeders rely upon a single reference genome to represent the genetic diversity in their germplasms? More and more scientists are deciding they cannot. At DuPont Pioneer, where DNA sequencing is paramount for R&D to reveal the genetic basis for…
Scientists championed their cases, school children sifted through species, and thousands of members of the public from around the globe took to social media to weigh in. Now the results are in, and high-quality genome assemblies for 25 organisms integral to United Kingdom ecosystems can begin. As mentioned last month, we teamed up with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute on a project to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. Sanger scientists will use the Sequel System and complementary technologies to produce reference-grade assemblies for squirrels, scallops, and sharks, as well as balsam, blackberries, bats, butterflies, bees, and many others. The final five…
Happy DNA Day, everyone! This scientific celebration has us reflecting on the many advancements the community has made in the past year. For a molecule that is sequenced thousands of times a day all over the world, there is still much to learn. Today we’d like to honor some of the remarkable science enabled by SMRT Sequencing since last year’s DNA Day. Scientists have continued to make progress exploring regions of the genome that have long been considered intractable. Two of our favorite stories this year came from the always-challenging Y chromosome. Researchers studying the mosquitoes that carry malaria…
We’re already looking forward to next month’s Personalized Medicine World Conference. Long before “precision medicine” was an industry catchphrase, PMWC was bringing together stakeholders from genomics companies and academic research, regulatory agencies, clinical groups, pharma/biotech, and more. Launched in 2009, the meeting has prompted important discussions as well as insight about how to move the field forward in a thoughtful way. From January 24th to the 27th, some 1,200 PMWC attendees will descend on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will kick off with a reception honoring the four awardees of this conference: Merck’s Roger Perlmutter…