NEW YORK, Dec. 21 (GenomeWeb News) - Meat & Livestock Australia said today that an international consortium has created a "virtual" sheep genome sequence, bringing researchers closer to a full genomic sequence of the sheep.
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The Institute for Genome Research recently completed the end sequence of over 2 million sheep bacterial artificial chromosome clones, MLA said. The clones were from a 10X sheep BAC library from Oakland, Calif.-based BACPAC Resources.
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Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation then assembled the sheep BAC end sequence against the bovine genome to "provide a framework" to anchor the sheep genome sequence, MLA said.
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The International Sheep Genomics Consortium, a $30 million joint initiative of MLA and Australian Wool Innovation, includes 10 research organizations from Australia and New Zealand.
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Funding for the BAC library and end sequencing came from a variety of sources, including New Zealand's AgResearch, United States' USDA-NRICGP and USDA-ARS, and Australia's MLA and AWI.