Bovine genome assembled( BETHESDA Md. Wed. Oct. 6 2004 The ...)

Contributors to the $53 million international effort to sequence the genome of the cow (Bos taurus) include: the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service; the state of Texas; Genome Canada through Genome British Columbia, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia; Agritech Investments Ltd., Dairy Insight, Inc. and AgResearch Ltd., all of New Zealand; the Kleberg Foundation; and the National, Texas and South Dakota Beef Check-off Funds.

A team led by Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., at Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Sequencing Center in Houston carried out the sequencing and assembly of the genome. Additional work aimed at uncovering more detailed information about individual bovine genes a process referred to as full-length cDNA sequencing is being conducted by a team led by Marco Marra, Ph.D., at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver.

The initial assembly is based on 3.3-fold coverage of the bovine genome. Researchers can access the sequence data through the following public databases: GenBank (www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank) at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), EMBL Bank (www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database and the DNA Data Bank of Japan

Researchers are continuing sequencing and plan to have a 6-fold draft of the bovine genome completed sometime
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Contact: Geoff Spencer
spencerg@mail.nih.gov
301-402-0911
NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute
6-Oct-2004