The scientific consortium has unveiled a new automated pipeline that allows thousands of genomes to be assembled quickly and easily. This tool supports the Earth BioGenome project’s goal of sequencing the genomes of 1.8 million species.
CIIMAR researcher Agostinho Antunes from the Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics team is part of the international consortium that has just unveiled a new computational tool that he argues is “a methodology that will certainly leverage the rapid advance of genome assembly on a global scale”.
One of the objectives of the Earth BioGenome project is to identify the species most at risk of extinction in order to preserve the genetic information of life. To this end, the project has set itself the global goal of sequencing, cataloging, and characterizing the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of ten years.
The developed tool – now described in a recent article published in the journal Nature Biotechnology – combines a series of bioinformatics methodologies put together in an orderly and automated way, which makes it possible to achieve virtually complete genome assemblies. The task of describing the genomes of the almost 1.8 million eukaryotic species known on earth in a short space of time is now more accessible, boosting its impact on conservation actions.
The first tests of this workflow were carried out on the assembly of a reference genome of the zebra finch (in the picture – © Creative Commons).
