NEW YORK, Oct. 6 (GenomeWeb News) - A first draft of the bovine genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases, the Bovine Genome Sequencing Project announced today.
Participants in the $53 million sequencing effort included the National Human Genome Research Institute; the US 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; Dairy Insight; AgResearch; the Kleberg Foundation; and the National, Texas, and South Dakota Beef Check-Off Funds.
The sequencing an assembly of the genome was conducted by a team led by Richard Gibbs at Baylor College of Medicine's Human Genome Sequencing Center in Houston. The initial assembly, which began in December 2003, is based on 3.3-fold coverage of the bovine genome, but researchers are continuing the sequencing and expect to complete a 6-fold draft during the first half of 2005.
Researchers can access the sequence data through the following databases: GenBank at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), EMBL Bank at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database, and the DNA Data Bank of Japan. The data will also be viewable through NCBI's Map Viewer, UCSC Genome Browser at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Ensembl Genome Browser at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England.