Pop quiz: Which animal accounts for around 20% of all living mammals, harbors (yet survives) some of the world’s deadliest diseases, lives proportionately longer than humans given its body size, and helps make tequila possible? Answer: Bats. From the tiniest bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) to the large (1kg) golden-capped fruitbat (Acerodon jubatus), the diversity and rare adaptations in bats have both fascinated and terrified people for centuries. Now, an international consortium of bat biologists, computational scientists, conservation organizations, and genome technologists has set out to decode the genomes of all 1,300 species of bats using SMRT Sequencing and other technologies.…
Genetic knowledge is powerful when it comes to breeding. The ability to trace desirable traits to the gene level can help create plants and animals that are adapted to existing and emerging challenges, such as temperature tolerance, productivity, or disease resistance. By crossing two breeds of cattle, Angus (Bos taurus taurus) and Brahman (Bos taurus indicus), from opposite ends of the species spectrum, breeders can benefit from the Angus’s high productivity in cool environments and the Brahman’s tolerance for harsh, hot climates and the diseases and parasites found there. Genetically and phenotypically, the two subspecies are very different. And,…
Many scientists who participated in the original Human Genome Project shared a grand vision that individual genomes would one day be part of routine medical care. Genomics veteran Richard Gibbs, founder and Director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine, tells Mendelspod host Theral Timpson in a new podcast interview that “we are more than halfway [there].” In the podcast, Gibbs shares his perspective on the complementary roles that genomics and genetics approaches have in driving our understanding of human biology. He noted that long before the Human Genome Project gained momentum, the discovery of human single…
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…
During the final days of the ASHG meeting last week in Baltimore, a number of scientists offered great presentations based on data generated with SMRT Sequencing, including an entire session on building platinum genomes. We’ve rounded up the highlights here: Karyn Meltz Steinberg from Washington University’s McDonnell Genome Institute spoke about building a platinum human assembly from single-haplotype genomes. Her team defines “platinum” as covering at least 98% of the sequence with every contig associated with a chromosome. They use long-read PacBio sequencing for de novo sequencing and assembly, followed by scaffolding with BioNano Genomics or Dovetail Genomics technology. When…