In this PacBio Virtual Global Summit 2020 presentation, Mara Lawniczak of the Sanger Institute shares how generating reference genome has a transformative and immeasurable impact on the study of a species. A prime example of this is the journey of the past 18 years since the first Anopheles reference genome was sequenced. Anopheles mosquitoes are of particular interest to both medical research and evolutionary biologists because of their role in transmitting all human malaria and because of their notoriously porous species boundaries. Lawniczak described various projects ranging from population genomics on hundreds of wild caught specimens from across Africa including from 100 year old museum specimens to using single mosquitoes to make better genome assemblies to building new tools for large scale genomic surveillance projects.
February 5, 2021 | Presentation