Doctor Bovine Genome
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fix the Assembly
I know, this is a very strange title for a post. More about that later... USDA Fellowship In this post I want to introduce you to part of my day-to-day research. In August of this year, I was awarded a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was awarded this fellowship for two reasons: to prepare to become a leader in agricultural science and to complete a specific project. My project is reassembly of the bovine reference genome sequence. Motivation: Why are we reassembling the bovine genome? The completion of the draft human genome sequence was announced to much fanfare in 2000. But, the work of finishing the human genome still continues. Two versions of the bovine reference sequence, by the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Maryland , were published in 2009. At that time the bovine genomics community began discussing how to improve the draft assembly. Key players suggested that more sequence data on L1 Dominette 01449, the cow on whom the reference s